Program development by stepwise refinement

Authors:
Niklaus Wirth
Affiliations:
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, Switzerland
Venue:
Communications of the ACM - Special 25th Anniversary Issue
Year:
1983

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Abstract

The creative activity of programming—to be distinguished from coding—is usually taught by examples serving to exhibit certain techniques. It is here considered as a sequence of design decisions concerning the decomposition of tasks into subtasks and of data into data structures. The process of successive refinement of specifications is illustrated by a short but nontrivial example, from which a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the art and the instruction of programming.