ABSTRACT
The ultimate goal of research workers in the area of statistical computing is to produce dependable, efficient, and useful computer programs. It is not sufficient to have good numerical methods and associated algorithms, because the algorithms must finally be properly expressed in a computer language if they are to be useful. There exist a multitude of languages for communicating instructions to the computer. For earliest computers, the user supplied instructions by arranging electrical circuits to effect the execution of desired operation. The basic purpose of computer programs is to operate on data: to store, move, display, and transform data. The features of a general-purpose, higher-level language all relate in some way to these activities with data. Programming languages, to varying extents, provide for specification of the data structure by rules for naming data. Most languages provide for scalar variables, which show no structure, and array variables, which show an orthogonal structure in as many directions as the dimension of array.
