Very High Level Languages for Spec/Design

1 Design

VHLL = Very High Level Languages
Consider a design to be a VHLL program, i.e., executable
Make up an appropriate VHLL, if nec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudocode This is a decent intro to psuedocode. In this course, we aim for much higher degree of precision and rigor.
"First Time" Programs (prototypes) should be done in VHLL

High-Level Data Structures: Sets, Sequences, Tables, Maps, …
High-Level Operations: Matrix ops, Bag Intersect, …
High-Level Control Structures: Map/Reduce, Higher Order Funcs, Concurrency, …
Ex: Distributed Data-Parallel Computing Using a High-Level Programming Language, SIGMOD, 2009
Ex: "hiCUDA: A High-level Directive-based Language for GPU" Programming Parallel and Distributed Systems conf, 2011

There are many tutorials, papers and books on DSLs.
Ex: Book "Domain Specific Languages", by Martin Fowler, 2010. http://martinfowler.com/books/dsl.html "DSLs are small languages, focused on a particular aspect of a software system. You can't build a whole program with a DSL, but you often use multiple DSLs in a system mainly written in a general purpose language."

Primary task of the programmer: Explain the design and implementation of a program to fellow humans.
Secondary task: Produce a ready-to-build collection of source code files.
An LP author presents it in an order that suits the explanation of the program to fellow software engineers, not necessarily in the order that a compiler may expect it.
Original idea by Professor Emeritus Donald Knuth, Stanford U, "fastest pen in the West", Turing Award Winner 1974, and the developer of the TeX typesetting system.
1. Donald E. Knuth, "Literate Programming", The Computer Journal, 1984, 27(2): 97-111.
2. weave Generate the .tex file(s) from .web file(s)
3. tangle Generate the source code file(s) from .web file(s)
http://www.literateprogramming.com/ "Design Documentation" Recommended Reading
http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf Required Reading

The typesetting program TeX is designed as a literate program by Knuth.
cweb by Knuth http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cweb.html
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb23-3-4/tb75saha.pdf Rambutan: Literate Programming in Java, TUGboat, Volume 23 (2002), No. 3/4
Knuth has several example programs at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html to read. His "Programming Pearls, Literate Programming: The Common Words Problem", 1986, was a Required Reading weeks ago.

cweb by Knuth http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cweb.html
noweb by Ramsey http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/ supports multiple PL
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Intent The Mylyn Intent prime objective is to make developers consider documentation as something useful and easy to maintain, that they can use to formalize their best practices and share their knowledge. Based on a new vision of the documentation, in which explanations in natural langage are formally linked with technical artefacts (java code, models, manifest files, bugzilla issues, git repositories, etc.), Intent allows you to efficiently update documentation when a change occurs in your software, turning it into a true Agile documentation.
http://lep.sourceforge.net/tutorials.htm Literate Eclipse Programming assists developers in writing structured, well documented source code. LEP integrates automated extraction of source code and documentation into a familiar eclipse environment. Compiling and debugging are fully supported.
More LP tools: noweb, nuweb, nano-lp, …; some of these are ready to apt-get install packages in Debian/Ubuntu distros. Visit http://www.literateprogramming.com/ for further details.