Sun 991121a740 -- Footnotes for DR's Forward to Marca and McGowan SADT book

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1.4 #1: The very first precursor to the Structured Analysis Author Guide had relatively little introductory material and is built heavily around "topic sheets" limited to one page each, and filled with exhortations, maxims, DOs, and DON’Ts with enough cross-referencing to weave them into a comprehensive and cohesive whole.

2.3 #2: Insert a copy of the APT Interim Report figure.

2.12 #3: Copy the AED Approach paper figure, too.

4.2&5 #4&5: Give a complete reference to the C in I paper.

IFIP’s Computers in Industry, Vol.14, 1990, pp. 175-180. SofTech TP280.

5.6 # 6: At the time I wrote this Preface, I'd forgotten how much help I got from my SofTech colleagues to complete the VMM Project for Cincinnati Milacron in a matter of weeks. It was not exactly a one-man show.

5.5 #7: Shizuo Hori had led the IITRI APT Long-range Program and later had gone to McDonnell Douglas, and was an important player in CAM-I, (Computer-aided Manufacturing - International), which grew out of ALRP.

5.9 #8: First public paper on SA: Structured Analysis in Proceedings of the International CAM Congress, May 1974, CAM-I, Inc., Arlington, Texas

6.3 #9: Regarding "A system has boundary, behavior, and substance…," the behavior and substance of a system are the happenings and things modeled by activities and data in SA, and the boundary is that of the SA Box which, like a supernova explosion, defines itself -- making room for itself -- in what I now call its "Here am I" broadcast (which is one way to relate Propositions P1-P5, at the foundations of Plex, to the current Big-Bang theory). It is only when its shock wave starts interacting with the similar shock waves of others that the actual boundaries between them start to become definitive. Thus creation is inside-out, while understanding (in SA) is outside in -- literally with introspection -- as the mutual interactions hold sway. [At its ultimate, if you imagine that the universe that thus is self-defined undergoes a super super-inflation, without loss of any of the centers of the "Here am I" spherical broadcasts, and (most importantly) pre-time, with unbounded speed -- then at infinite distance in a closed universe, all those wave fronts will be found to have expanded into plane-waves, crashing together from all directions (the Buddhist Master’s "Clap with one hand." !!!) in a cataclysmic backwards-running opposite of a black hole -- providing the P6 birth of the newest "Here am I" of the ever-expanding universe, with neither beginning nor end -- compatible with modern cosmology.]

6.6 #10: The end of this paragraph: "Abstractly, a science has ..." to "... include them all." is an ultra-concise statement of the objectives of I-Campus -- a truly proper home for SADTR/AUT.

7.2 #11: The phrase "the language most natural" puts the proper technical spin on the expression "natural language" -- making it accessible for the Understanding Technology of AUT.

8.6 #12: My 1990s definition is:

"M models A to the extent that M correctly answers questions about A."

-- and I point out that the most comprehensive, while it the same time the most primitive and totally un-revealing, model is the proper name "A" of <A> so " "s are naming quotes, which matches A's <Here am I> broadcast boundary with Plex's < > meaning/finding brackets

[while <’> simply signifies, so matching ' 's signify, and since, in Plex, the Formal Saying:

‘Nothing separates consecutive words.’

provides the definition of word (where <"word">=<word>=<’word’> and word is word’s concept and <"> signifies the Nothing of <nothing>-quotation/separation and <’’’>=<’>= | -- "the mark")] --

(-- all the way from spoken phonemes to written symbols, fragments, syllables, sentences, paragraphs, books, etc.).

8.1 #13: My 1990s version of the SA Box's Formal Saying has one more line:

Under control, input is transformed into output by the mechanism,

which augments the inherited means.

The inheritance comes from the recursive SA Maxim, and augmentation is SA’s Supported Calls.

8.16 #14: In 1990s terminology, a branch is either a fork or a join.

8.19 #15: From "Box and diagram..." to the "... defined meaning." end of that paragraph -- all of these matters are updated to the 1990s level required for I-Campus research, implementation, and education-research in the 1994 SA SIG Slides with I-C Update Notes.

2. #16: The restriction to "three" is a practical one (i.e. one of practice, not theory) in that actual, definitive structure rather than just bounded nesting begins with three SA Box boundaries -- see the sticky-blobs semantics picturing showing that, without one of its embedded sticks being released, a blob cannot escape by squeezing through an arrow’s open channel. [That is, in fact, what happens in the case of "migrating B-box" adjustment of an interface, in SA -- when <old,new> the ‘B stick-connection is released:

<<A + ‘B| C>,<A |B’ + C>>

and B changes Parents (and <<A>,<C>> siblings!) as the ‘|’ boundary-mark moves over, and B’ re-connects.]

9.4 #17: Only in 1994 did I finally discover the proper syntax/semantics/concise notation for SA's Supported Calls (ibid.)

9.7 #18: My 1976 "SA Essay" supplement to the SADT Author Guide, written to help with the teaching of SADT to the many nationalities in ITT Europe, along with the original topic-sheet style, which was carried over into the Author Guide, itself -- is less of a cook-book approach than that found in the Marca & McGowan book.

9.10 #19: The I-Campus goal of Web-based interactive distance learning is the real place where the actual variety of teaching methods and styles can be worked out in multiple, open-to-all Reader/Author Cycle-modulated orgies. I very much hope that my SADTR/AUT project can find an enthusiastic and welcoming home in the Institute-wide I-Campus world. Ever since my part-time return to MIT as EECS Lecturer in the 1980s, having slashed my SofTech salary to pursue my own Plex research interests as an outgrowth of SADT, that has been my goal.

9.13 #20: The SA Librarian can fully be Web-tools supported.

11.10 #21: SA Activity and Data Models when tied together by the SA Tie process have no external boundary conditions and therefore the result is totally definitive.

11,15 #22: The ultimate simulation semantics for SA activity modeling is Colored Petrie Nets, already tool-supported by Metasoftware's IDEF0 tool (with their overloading of SA syntax, etc.). A modern implementation of a tool for my complete 1990s SADTR, including simulation tied to multimedia displays, will be a fruitful R&D effort, useful to many applications of the methodology.