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Home/Magazine Archive/August 1975 (Vol. 18, No. 8)/Guarded commands, nondeterminacy and formal derivation.../Abstract

Guarded commands, nondeterminacy and formal derivation of programs

By Edsger W. Dijkstra
Communications of the ACM, August 1975, Vol. 18 No. 8, Pages 453-457
10.1145/360933.360975
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So-called “guarded commands” are introduced as a building block for alternative and repetitive constructs that allow nondeterministic program components for which at least the activity evoked, but possibly even the final state, is not necessarily uniquely determined by the initial state. For the formal derivation of programs expressed in terms of these constructs, a calculus will be be shown.

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