A Process Elaboration Formalism for Writing and Analyzing Programs
Abstract
This research effort presents a formalism for writing programs which explicitly addresses and highlights some program construction issues. The formalism, a kind of production system, generates a graph that defines the process under inspection, making explicit both when and where variable bindings take place. From the standpoint of proper data structuring these extra dimensions are useful for analyzing a program, particularly with respect to ease of data access, access ambiguity, proper sequence of bindings, and other related issues. Because the formalism is a natural one for parsing a protocol of an instance of the process described by the productions, the system will be able to run in two modes: generation (to produce a behavior instance) or parse (determining whether a particular behavior instance could have been generated from a given program). Both these capabilities are important in debugging programs, especially those written in an Automatic Programming environment in which the system may be communicating with a nonprogrammer.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1975
- Accession Number
- ADA016785
Entities
People
- David Wilczynski
Organizations
- University of Southern California