An overview of nonprocedural languages

Abstract

This paper attempts to describe some of the basic characteristics and issues involving the class of programming languages commonly referred to as "nonprocedural" or "very high level". The paper discusses major issues such as terminology, relativeness, and arbitrary sequencing. Five features of nonprocedural languages are described, and a number of specific languages are discussed briefly. A short history of the subject is included.

Incremental program testing in a very high level language

“…This paper supports that view but goes further in advocating a testing and debugging approach based on very high level languages [5]. Although the approach is applicable to any language with properties to be described here, its application will be shown with respect to the Business Definition Language (BDL) [3], designed primarily for data processing applications.…”

“…It is assumed that each record in the subgroup has an identical value for the field F. (5) indicates that R1 or S is the causing element of R2. (6) selects the subgroup S of group G satisfying the logical expression L.…”

“…If now the light pen is pointed to either Product number (FIELD/GROUP column), Detail Product number (CAUSE/DERIVATION column), or Detail Product number (NAME column) in the graphical representation of the source program, together with a request to calculate, the result will be the list of values (6,2,5,4) using the sample input data of fig. 2.…”

Improving the human factors aspect of database interactions

“…Database query languages provide a new domain for the controversy between specification languages, which describe the goal, and procedural languages, which describe a process for arriving at the goal [25]. This classification is not discrete: a language may fit in the continuum between the extremes described here.…”

Requirements statement language principles for automatic programming

“…Teichroew [i] surveys seven proposed languages and describes several desirable features of an RSL. Recent references include Couger [2], Leavenworth and Sammet [3], Benjamin [4], Merten and Teichroew [S], and McGee [6]. Earlier references include Pridmore [7].…”