Toward a discipline of real-time programming

  • Authors:
  • Niklaus Wirth

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH, Zürich, Switzerland and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1977

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Abstract

Programming is divided into three major categories with increasing complexity of reasoning in program validation: sequential programming, multiprogramming, and real-time programming. By adhering to a strict programming discipline and by using a suitable high-level language molded after this discipline, the complexity of reasoning about concurrency and execution time constraints may be drastically reduced. This may be the only practical way to make real-time systems analytically verifiable and ultimately reliable. A possible discipline is outlined and expressed in terms of the language Modula.