Reasoned Programming

by Susan Eisenbach

This text is for use by advanced undergraduate/graduate students of computer science. Taking a formal approach to the teaching of computer science, this book introduces functional, imperative and logic programming and explains how to programme correctly. Although most of the techniques presented are not new, the approach itself is novel. Functional programming is presented as a programming language in its own right, but also a reasoning tool in imperative programming. The text discusses semantics and covers procedures which are often ignored, and examples illustrate the arguments.

Paperback

First published October 6, 1994

Reviews

[Errol Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this would give me much more about reasoning in programming but I felt disappointed.

[Alan]

Hasn't remained overly relevant given its focus on Miranda, but I Still found value in reading it in 2018. More value in the early parts which where generic rather than Miranda based.

I did make a few notes because some of the early sections still resonated:

page 7 "...specifications can have mistakes in them, and this will manifest itself in unexpected and unwanted features in a formally correct program. Hence correctness is only an approximation to quality"
page 25 - "The purpose of precedence rules is to resolve possible ambiguity and to allow us to use fewer parentheses in expressions."
page 37 - "The code can only tell you what the computer does, not what the result was meant to be."

Also a reminder of the importance of concepts such as: Equivalence, Preconditions, Postconditions - and you'll get that in any book on formal methods.