Use of a Nonprocedural Specification Language and Associated Program Generator in Software Development

Abstract

The Model II language and the associated program generator are used to explain and illustrate the use of very high level nonprocedural languages for computer programming. The effect of a very high level language is obtained in Model II through the elimination of procedural and control facilities that exist in high level programming languages such as PL/I or Cobol. In particular, the statements may be given in any order and there are no control constructs such as input/output, iterations, and memory allocation. The task of ordering the statements for execution and providing control statements is performed by the automatic program generator. The specification of a program is therefore much shorter (approximately one-fifth) than the equivalent high level procedural language program. Most important, a user need not regard the task of specifying a program as defining a process but rather as describing data and relations. This point of view greatly reduces the computer programming proficiency required of a user. The paper focuses on an example of the use of the language in business data processing, its advantages, and its novelty. It only briefly reviews the methodology incorporated in the existing program generator, a detailed description of which may be found in the references.