A generalized iterative construct and its semantics

  • Authors:
  • Ed Anson

  • Affiliations:
  • CalCamp Display Products Division, Hudson, NH

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

A new programming language construct, called DOupon, subsumes Dijkstra's selective (IF) and iterative (DO) constructs. DOupon has a predicate transformer approximately equivalent in complexity to that for DO. In addition, it simplifies a wide variety of algorithms, in form as well as in discovery and proof. Several theorems are demonstrated that are useful for correctness proofs and for optimization and that are not applicable to DO or IF. The general usefulness of DOupon derives from a separation of the concerns of invariance, through iteration, from those of termination.