1,205 papers · page 51 of 61
This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing on its overall structure—that is, the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. I…
With current compiler technology, changing a single line in a large software system may trigger massive recompilations. If the change occurs in a file with shared declarations, all compilation units depending upon that file must be recompiled to assure consistency. However, many …
A supercompiler is a program transformer of a certain type. It traces the possible generalized histories of computation by the original program, and compiles an equivalent program, reducing in the process the redundancy that could be present in the original program. The nature of…
A persistent programming environment, together with a language that supports first class procedures, may be used to provide the semantic features of other object modeling languages. In particular, the two concepts may be combined to implement abstract data types, modules, separat…
In this paper we outline an approach to describing and analyzing designs for distributed software systems. A descriptive notation is introduced, and analysis techniques applicable to designs expressed in that notation are presented. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated b…
Given a general arithmetic expression, we find a computation binary tree representation in O (log n ) time using n /log n processors on a concurrent-read, exclusive-write, parallel random-access machine. A new algorithm is introduced for this purpose. Unlike previous serial and p…
Several fairly large sets of programming rules have been developed recently. It is natural to ask whether the process of developing such rule bases may converge. Having developed sets of rules for specific programming tasks and domains, will they be helpful when other tasks and d…
The significant intellectual cost of programming is for problem solving and explaining, not for coding. Yet programming systems offer mechanical assistance for the coding process exclusively. We illustrate the use of an implemented program development system, called PRL ("pearl")…
Until recently, information-flow analysis has been used primarily to verify that information transmission between program variables cannot violate security requirements. Here, the notion of information flow is explored as an aid to program development and validation. Information-…
We present a different style of axiomatic definition for programming languages. It is oriented toward imperative languages, such as Algol 68, that do not distinguish between statements and expressions. Rather than basing the logic on a notion of pre- or postcondition, we use the …
DNP (dynamic networks of processes) is a variant of the language introduced by Kahn and MacQueen [11, 12]. In the language it is possible to create new processes dynamically. We present a complete, formal denotational semantics for the language, along the lines sketched by Kahn a…
Our goal is to develop formal methods for abstracting a given set of programs into a program schema and for instantiating a given schema to satisfy concrete specifications. Abstraction and instantiation are two important phases in software development which allow programmers to a…
An important goal of programming language research is to isolate the fundamenal concepts of languages, those basic ideas that allow us to understand the relationships among various language features. This paper examines one of these underlying notions, that of data type , with pa…
The problem of generalizing functional specifications for while loops is considered. This problem occurs frequently when trying to verify that an initialized loop satisfies some functional specification, i.e., produces outputs which are some function of the program inputs. The no…
We argue for the need of supporting a symmetric select construct, in which entry calls as well as accepts can be alternatives. We present several situations in which a symmetric select leads to a more natural programming style. We show that several semantic principles are violate…
An efficient algorithm for communicating letter-shape information from a high-speed computer with a large memory to a typesetting device that has a limited memory is presented. The encoding is optimum, in the sense that the total time for typesetting is minimized, using a model t…
Affix grammars are used to describe the instruction set of a target architecture for purposes of compiler code generation. A code generator is obtained automatically for a compiler using attributed parsing techniques. A compiler built on this model can automatically perform most …
Generative communication is the basis of a new distributed programming langauge that is intended for systems programming in distributed settings generally and on integrated network computers in particular. It differs from previous interprocess communication models in specifying t…
We introduce POINTY, an interactive system for constructing world-model-based programs for robots. POINTY combines an interactive programming environment with the teaching-by-guiding methodology that has been successful in industrial robotics. Owing to its ability to control robo…