Re: The joy of Ada

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 10:29:01 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

Analytical Engine and Difference Engine were two different things, IIRC.

Of course they were. It’s just that Ms Padua seemed to prefer the name
“Difference Engine”, when the machine in her cartoon strip clearly has
more of the properties of the Analytical Engine.

In real life, the Difference Engine was designed purely to compute and
print difference tables. In other words, tables of polynomial functions.

The Analytical Engine had more of the characteristics we would recognize
as those of a modern programmable digital computer. I recall Babbage
described it at one point as “the engine eating its own tail”. Which was
one way of describing an iterative loop.