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Abstraction and verification in Alphard: defining and specifying iteration and generators

Authors:

William A. Wulf,

Ralph L. LondonAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 20, Issue 8

Pages 553 - 564

https://doi.org/10.1145/359763.359782

Published: 01 August 1977 Publication History

Abstract

The Alphard “form” provides the programmer with a great deal of control over the implementation of abstract data types. In this paper the abstraction techniques are extended from simple data representation and function definition to the iteration statement, the most important point of interaction between data and the control structure of the language itself. A means of specializing Alphard's loops to operate on abstract entities without explicit dependence on the representation of those entities is introduced. Specification and verification techniques that allow the properties of the generators for such iterations to be expressed in the form of proof rules are developed. Results are obtained that for common special cases of these loops are essentially identical to the corresponding constructs in other languages. A means of showing that a generator will terminate is also provided.

References

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Shaw, M., Wulf, W.A., and London, R.L. Abstraction and verification in Alphard: Iteration and generators. Tech. Reports, Inform. Sci. Inst., U. of Southern California, Marina del Rey, Calif., and Carnegie-Mellon U., Pittsburgh, Pa., 1976.]]

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Cited By

Kiselyov OBiboudis APalladinos NSmaragdakis Y(2017)Stream fusion, to completenessACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093333.300988052:1(285-299)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093333.3009880
Kiselyov OBiboudis APalladinos NSmaragdakis YCastagna GGordon A(2017)Stream fusion, to completenessProceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/3009837.3009880(285-299)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3009837.3009880
Castagna GGordon A(2017)Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming LanguagesundefinedOnline publication date: 1-Jan-2017
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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM Volume 20, Issue 8

Aug. 1977

74 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/359763

Editor:
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1977 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 1977

Published in CACM Volume 20, Issue 8

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Cited By

Kiselyov OBiboudis APalladinos NSmaragdakis Y(2017)Stream fusion, to completenessACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093333.300988052:1(285-299)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093333.3009880
Kiselyov OBiboudis APalladinos NSmaragdakis YCastagna GGordon A(2017)Stream fusion, to completenessProceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/3009837.3009880(285-299)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3009837.3009880
Castagna GGordon A(2017)Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming LanguagesundefinedOnline publication date: 1-Jan-2017
Newton RAğacan ÖFogg PTobin-Hochstadt S(2016)Parallel type-checking with haskell using saturating LVars and stream generatorsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3016078.285114251:8(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3016078.2851142
Newton RAğacan ÖFogg PTobin-Hochstadt SAsenjo RHarris T(2016)Parallel type-checking with haskell using saturating LVars and stream generatorsProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/2851141.2851142(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2851141.2851142
Tompa FRamírez R(2016)An Aid For The Selection Of Efficient Storage StructuresINFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research10.1080/03155986.1983.1173189921:3(206-229)Online publication date: 25-May-2016
https://doi.org/10.1080/03155986.1983.11731899
Bagge AHaveraaen M(2014)Specification of generic APIs, orACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/2692956.266318334:3(71-80)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2692956.2663183
Bagge AHaveraaen MFeldman MTaft T(2014)Specification of generic APIs, orProceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGAda annual conference on High integrity language technology10.1145/2663171.2663183(71-80)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2663171.2663183
Kiselyov OPeyton-Jones SSabry A(2012)Lazy v. Yield: Incremental, Linear Pretty-PrintingProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-642-35182-2_14(190-206)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35182-2_14
Kiselyov O(2012)IterateesProceedings of the 11th international conference on Functional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-642-29822-6_15(166-181)Online publication date: 23-May-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-29822-6_15
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