Persuasive Programming

Back

For years, computer programmers have created programs with formal syntax and informal semantics. They have produced nicely formatted programs with imprecise comments documenting more the structure of the code than the semantics. This book presents frequently encountered problems and reviews them within the context of semantics to arrive at better solutions.

The audience for the book is the programmer desiring to take his/her craft to a new level or the serious student seeking additional insight in the process of achieving program correctness.

The focus is on program content rather than form. The approach is to use assertions to reflect properties of a program’s state or semantic content. Admittedly, the use of assertions is not new. What is new is the semantically-based approach to the use of asseritons.

There are two aspects of persuasive programming: the semantics of program statements and the integration of the semantics into the text of the program. The first can be learned; the second must be experienced. The approach to presenting statement semantics is to determine for each statement type a pattern of assertions which describes the semantics. This book works from the obvious pattern (often the most clumsy) and then, analyzing examples, works its way toward a more useful pattern.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Semantics-Perspective Matters
3. Semantic Building Blocks
4. Semantics of Simple Statements
5. Semantics and High-Level Statements
6. Semantics of Selection
7. Semantics of Repetition
8. Semantics of Abstraction
9. Are You Persuaded?
10. Semantics and Data Abstraction
11. More on Selection
12. More on Repetition
13. More on Abstraction
14. Are You Persuaded?