A Discipline of Programming

Dijkstra, E. W. (1976). A Discipline of Programming. Prentice Hall.

Type

Book chapter

Intellectual base

Textbook

Year

1976

ISBN

9780132158718

Link

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5211853Mmatched

Cited from

computer_science, linguistics_semiotics, mathematics

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Constraint
  • … as a distinct computer-science subfield; Floyd's 1967 "Assigning Meanings to Programs" and Hoare's 1969 axiomatic semantics recast program correctness as the preservation of logical invariants under each program step, treating invariants as constraints on reachable states; Dijkstra's 1976 A Discipline of Programming

    This sourceGuarded commands, weakest-precondition calculus, constraint-based program derivation. Pedagogical extension: Gries, The Science of Programming (Springer, 1981).

• Iteration
  • The structural kinship with Newton's method is precise— same diagnostic questions (what is the state update, what is the progress measure, what is the stopping rule), same failure modes (no measurable progress, bad step size, wrong stopping rule)— even though the substrate is product development rather than function-zero finding
• Meta-Symbolic Reflection
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Recursion
  • A common failure is mutual recursion where both functions increase their arguments, creating infinite loops that appear valid locally

    This sourceGuarded commands, weakest-precondition calculus, constraint-based program derivation. Pedagogical extension: Gries, The Science of Programming (Springer, 1981).

Domain-specific

• Hoare Logic
  • Dijkstra developed this into a program-construction discipline in which programs and proofs can be derived together.

    This sourceFoundational treatment of guarded commands and weakest-precondition reasoning.

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