Knowledge about programs
Susan L. Gerhart · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1975
Dijkstra suggests in his “Notes on Structured Programming” that program schema and theorems about their correctness may describe the way that programmers understand programming. This paper follows up his suggestion by describing a general model for domains of programming knowledge in terms of schema, transformations, and derivation rules. The model is illustrated by the results of a case study of the knowledge about 10 programs which use arrays. The model and case study illustrate a methodology for constructing and proving correct programs based on knowledge which is independently expressed and partially proved in an abstract form and which can be applied in a stepwise way.