A logical approach to designing procedural programming languages (abstract)

Abstract

New concepts can sometimes be developed by viewing a well established subject matter from a different perspective. A new perspective which has the potential for developing new concepts for designing and defining procedural programming languages is presented. The guidelines for designing procedural programming languages are educed from an analysis of generalized temporal logic. Generalized temporal logic is briefly discussed to present a logical approach to language definition and to arrive at the necessary syntactic and semantic entities for defining procedural programming languages. Then a new definition is given to the essential constructs of sequential programming languages. Next the Propositional Procedural programming Logic Lpp is presented. It is shown that the logic Lpp can be used to express sequential programs, generalized rule-based (in which rules can be fired concurrently) programs, and a certain type of concurrent programs. In this framework, program execution is equivalent to executing a model-searching algorithm. Model-searching algorithms exist independent of a language definition. This allows one to implement a language in any of the sequential, parallel, or distributed computing environments. The potential, applicability, and some of the advantages of this logical approach are presented.