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LASER Summer School on Software Engineering

LASER Summer School on Software Engineering

LASER 2013, LASER 2014: Software Engineering pp 159–189Cite as

Theory of Programs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8987))

Abstract

“Computer science” (informatics) is really program science since a computer, by itself too general a machine to be of practical interest, yields useful machines through programs that people write for it.

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References

  1. Back, refinement papers

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  2. Michael Butler: Personal communication

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  3. Dijkstra: A Discipline of Programming

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  4. Euler: Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers Sujets de Physique et de Philosophie, pp. 1760–1762

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  5. Furia, Meyer, Velder: Computing Surveys invariant article

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  6. Hehner: Predicative Programming

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  7. Hoare: Original paper on Laws of Programming

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  8. Hoare, van Staden: Newer article

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  9. Hoare, van Staden: Slides accompanying [8]

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  10. Kahn: Natural Semantics

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  11. Meyer: IFIP 1980 paper

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  12. Meyer: ETL

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  13. Meyer: OOSC

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  14. Meyer: Multirequirements

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  15. Morgan: Programming from Specifications

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  16. Shaoying Liu: paper and slides from the 2014 Futatsugi Festschrift

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  17. Wirth: Stepwise refinement

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Acknowledgments

The authors invoked explicitly or not in Sect. 6 (Hoare and coauthors, Kahn, Dijkstra, Scott/Strachey/Plotkin and other pioneers of denotational semantics), complemented by Abrial for his work on Z and B and by Mills and Gries, deserve deep acknowledgments for pioneering the formal approach to programs and programming. Back’s and Morgan’s seminal work on refinement (following Wirth’s) is another fundamental inspiration. Hehner’s work on Predicative Programming is a comprehensive theory of programming based on binary relations, corresponding to the postconditions of the present work. (I am also indebted to him for a particularly careful reading of the first draft.) Also influential have been informal comments by David Parnas on the merits of different assertion styles. A note by Shaoying Liu [16], criticizing a purported deficiency in classical refinement approaches (the risk of refining into an unfeasible program), suggested the need for a proper notion of feasibility.

I am grateful to Daniel de Carvalho and Colin Adams for corrections on the first draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bertrand Meyer

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  1. Bertrand Meyer
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Correspondence to Bertrand Meyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich , Zürich, Switzerland

    Bertrand Meyer

  2. ETH Zurich , Zürich, Switzerland

    Martin Nordio

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Meyer, B. (2015). Theory of Programs. In: Meyer, B., Nordio, M. (eds) Software Engineering. LASER LASER 2013 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8987. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28406-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28406-4_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28405-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28406-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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