• DOI:10.1145/357980.358010
Corpus ID: 652656

Program development by stepwise refinement

@article{Wirth1983ProgramDB,
  title={Program development by stepwise refinement},
  author={N. Wirth},
  journal={Commun. ACM},
  year={1983},
  volume={26},
  pages={70-74}
}

N. Wirth

Published 1983

Computer Science

Commun. ACM

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The creative activity of programming—to be distinguished from coding—is usually taught by examples serving to exhibit certain techniques. It is here considered as a sequence of design decisions concerning the decomposition of tasks into subtasks and of data into data structures. The process of successive refinement of specifications is illustrated by a short but nontrivial example, from which a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the art and the instruction of programming.