The Shape of Code

I thought it would be useful to list the books that gripped me one way or another this year (and may be last year since I don’t usually track such things closely); perhaps they will give you some ideas to add to your Christmas present wish list (please make your own suggestions in the Comments). Most of the books were published a few years ago, I maintain piles of books ordered by when I plan to read them and books migrate between piles until eventually read. Looking at the list I don’t seem to have read many good books this year, perhaps I am spending too much time reading blogs.

These books contain plenty of facts backed up by numbers and an analytic approach and are ordered by physical size.

The New Science of Strong Materials by J. E. Gordon. Ideal for train journeys since it is a small book that can be read in small chunks and is not too taxing. Offers lots of insight into those properties of various materials that are needed to build things (’new’ here means postwar).

Europe at War 1939-1945 by Norman Davies. A fascinating analysis of the war from a numbers perspective. It is hard to escape the conclusion that in the grand scheme of things us plucky Brits made a rather small contribution, although subsequent Hollywood output has suggested otherwise. Also a contender for a train book.

Japanese English language and culture contact by James Stanlaw. If you are into Japanese culture you will love this, otherwise avoid.

Evolutionary Dynamics by Martin A. Nowak. For the more mathematical folk and plenty of thought power needed. Some very powerful general results from simple processes.

Analytic Combinatorics by Philippe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick. Probably the toughest mathematical book I have kept at (yet to get close to the end) in a few years. If number sequences fascinate you then give it a try (a pdf is available).

Probability and Computing by Michael Mitzenmacher and Eli Upfal. For the more mathematical folk and plenty of thought power needed. Don’t let the density of Theorems put you off, the approach is broad brush. Plenty of interesting results with applications to solving problems using algorithms containing a randomizing component.

Network Algorithmics by George Varghese. A real hackers book. Not so much a book about algorithms used to solve networking problems but a book about making engineering trade-offs and using every ounce of computing functionality to solve problems having severe resource and real-time constraints.

Virtual Machines by James E. Smith and Ravi Nair. Everything you every wanted to know about virtual machines and more.

Biological Psychology by James W. Kalat. This might be a coffee table book for scientists. Great illustrations, concise explanations, the nuts and bolts of how our bodies runs at the protein/DNA level.

Yesterday I finally delivered a paper on if/switch usage measurements to the ACCU magazine editor and today I read about a switch statement usage that if common, would invalidate a chunk of my results. Does anything jump out at you in the following snippet?

switch (x)
   {
   case 1:
             {
             z++;
             ...
             break;
             }
...

Yes, those { } delimiting the case-labeled statement sequence. A quick check of my C source benchmarks showed this usage occurring in around 1% of case-labels. Panic over.

What is the statistical significance, i.e., variance, of that 1%? Have I simply measured an unrepresentative sample, what would be a representative sample and what would be the expected variance within a representative sample?

I am interested in commercial software development and so I have selected half a dozen or so largish code bases as my source benchmark, preferably written in a commercial environment even if currently available as Open source. I would prefer this benchmark to be an order of magnitude larger and perhaps I will get around to adding more programs soon.

My if/switch measurements were aimed at finding usage characteristics that varied between the two kinds of selection statements. One characteristic measured was the number of equality tests in the associated controlling expression. For instance, in:

if (x == 1 || x == 2)
   z--;
else if (x == 3)
   z++;

the first controlling expression contains two equality tests and the second one equality test.

Plotting the percentage of equality tests that occur in the controlling expressions of if-if/if-else-if sequences and switch statements we get the following:

Do these results indicate that if-if/if-else-if sequences and switch statements differ in the number of equality tests contained in their controlling expressions? If I measured a completely different set of source code, would the results be very different?

To answer this question a probability model is needed. Take as an example the controlling expressions present in an if-if sequence. If each controlling expression is independent of the others, then the probability of two equality tests, for instance, occurring in any of these expressions is constant and thus given a large sample the distribution of two equality tests in the source has a binomial distribution. The same argument can be applied to other numbers of equality tests and other kinds of sequence.

For each measurement point in the above plot the associated error bars span the square-root of the variance of that point (assuming a binomial distribution, for a normal distribution the length of this span is known as the standard deviation). The error bars overlap suggesting that the apparent difference in percentage of equality tests in each kind of sequence is not statistically significant.

The existence of some dependency between controlling expression equality tests would invalidate this simply analysis, or at least reduce its reliability. I did notice that in a sequence that containing two equality tests, the controlling expression that contained it tended to appear later in the sequence (the reverse of the example given above). Did I notice this because I tend to write this way? A question for another day.

A few years ago The Edge asked people to write about what important issue(s) they had recently changed their mind about. This is an interesting question and something people ought to ask themselves every now and again. So what did I change my mind about in 2008?

1. Formal verification of nontrivial C programs is a very long way off. A whole host of interesting projects (e.g., Caduceus, Comcert and Frame-C) going on in France has finally convinced me that things are a lot closer than I once thought. This does not mean that I think developers/managers will be willing to use them, only that they exist.

2. Automatically extracting useful information from source code identifier names is still a long way off. Yes, I am a great believer in the significance of information contained in identifier names. Perhaps because I have studied the issues in detail I know too much about the problems and have been put off attacking them. A number of researchers (e.g., Emily Hill, David Shepherd, Adrian Marcus, Lin Tan and a previously blogged about project) have simply gone ahead and managed to extract (with varying amount of human intervention) surprising amounts of useful from identifier names.

3. Theoretical analysis of non-trivial floating-point oriented programs is still a long way off. Daumas and Lester used the Doobs-Kolmogorov Inequality (I had to look it up) to deduce the probability that the rounding error in some number of floating-point operations, within a program, will exceed some bound. They also integrated the ideas into NASA’s PVS system.

You can probably spot the pattern here, I thought something would not happen for years and somebody went off and did it (or at least made an impressive first step along the road). Perhaps 2008 was not a good year for really major changes of mind, or perhaps an earlier in the year change of mind has so ingrained itself in my mind that I can no longer recall thinking otherwise.

Developers and testers rarely put any thought into working out the likely distribution of numeric values (final or intermediate) computed during the execution of the code they write.

The likely value of a variable is useful to know in a number of situations, including optimizing code (should it prove to be necessary) for the common case and testing (what distribution of input values are needed to be confident that all paths through a program are exercised?)

The answer for the ’simple’ distributions is actually more complicated to work with than the more ‘complicated’ distributions. For instance, the sum of two independent values having a normal distributions is a normal distribution and the sum of two Poisson distributions is also a Poisson distribution.

What if the values are uniformly distributed? If two independent, randomly chosen, uniformly distributed, variables, are added what is the distribution of the result? For instance, if the values of X and Y are independent of each other and take on any value between 0 and 9, with equal likelihood, what is the most (and least) likely value of X+Y?

Warning: Information spoilers follow.

You are probably thinking that the result will also be uniformly distributed and indeed it would be if the range of values taken by X and Y did not overlap. When the possible range of values overlap exactly the answer is the triangular distribution, with the mostly likely result being 9 and the least likely results being 0 and 18.

The variance of the actual result distribution is approximately six times smaller than the original distribution, meaning that the common cases occupy a much narrower value range. This value range ‘narrowing’ goes someway towards helping to explain the surprising discovery that during program execution a small set of (integer and floating) values often occur with such regularity that it might be worth cpu arithmetic units remembering previous operands and their results (i.e., to save time by returning the result rather than recalculating it).