A Connotational Theory Of Program Structure

This book presents developments of a language independent theory of program structure. The theory features a simple, natural notion of control structure which is much broader than in other theories of programming languages such as denotational semantics and program schemes. This notion permits treatment of control structures which involve not only the denotation of programs (i.e., their input/output behavior), but also their structure, size, run times, etc. The theory also treats the relation of control structure and complexity properties of programming languages. The book focuses on expressive interdependencies of control structures (which control structures can be expressed by which others). A general method of proving control structures expressively independent is developed. The book also considers characterizations of the expressive power of general purpose programming languages in terms of control structures. Several new characterizations are presented and two compactness results for such characterizations are shown.

This book presents developments of a language independent theory of program structure. The theory features a simple, natural notion of control structure which is much broader than in other theories of programming languages such as denotational semantics and program schemes. This notion permits treatment of control structures which involve not only the denotation of programs (i.e., their input/output behavior), but also their structure, size, run times, etc. The theory also treats the relation of control structure and complexity properties of programming languages. The book focuses on expressive interdependencies of control structures (which control structures can be expressed by which others). A general method of proving control structures expressively independent is developed. The book also considers characterizations of the expressive power of general purpose programming languages in terms of control structures. Several new characterizations are presented and two compactness results for such characterizations are shown.

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2007, held in Ceský Krumlov, Czech Republic, August 2007. The 61 revised full papers presented together with the full papers or abstracts of five invited talks address all current aspects in theoretical computer science and its mathematical foundations.

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Symposium Fundamentals of Computation Theory, FCT 2009, held in Wroclaw, Poland in August 2009. The 29 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers address all current topics in computation theory such as automata and formal languages, design and analysis of algorithms, computational and structural complexity, semantics, logic, algebra and categories in computer science, circuits and networks, learning theory, specification and verification, parallel and distributed systems, concurrency theory, cryptography and cryptograhic protocols, approximation and randomized algorithms, computational geometry, quantum computation and information, bio-inspired computation.