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Modelling Nondeterminism

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Mathematics of Program Construction (MPC 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3125))

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Abstract

For many years the realm of total functions was considered to be the natural domain in which to reason about functional programs [B90]. The limitation of this domain is that it can only be used to describe deterministic programs: those that deliver only one output for each input. More recently, the development of the relational calculus for program derivation [BdM97] has allowed programmers to reason about programs together with their speci.cations, which may be nondeterministic: they may o.er a choice of outputs for each input. Speci.cations expressed in this calculus can be manipulated and re.ned into functions that can be translated into an appropriate functional programming language. We now propose to go one step further, since the domain of relations can be used to describe only angelic or demonic nondeterminism, but not both.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Martin, C.E., Curtis, S.A., Rewitzky, I. (2004). Modelling Nondeterminism. In: Kozen, D. (eds) Mathematics of Program Construction. MPC 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3125. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27764-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27764-4_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22380-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-27764-4

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