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Lamport’s Computation and State Machines[0] is an interesting take on relating mathematics to computer programming. Lamport appears to treat programs as state m
by strogonoff 3y ago
Lamport’s Computation and State Machines[0] is an interesting take on relating mathematics to computer programming. Lamport appears to treat programs as state machines, making it possible to reason about those with pure mathematics (in a way independent of programming language syntactic constructs).
[0] https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/state-machine.pdf&type=exact https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/...
- zozbot234 3y agoYou can also express the "programs as state machines" view in terms of programming language constructs, namely monads (for Time, State and Non-Determinism). If you take a strictly mathematical view of the topic you'll call these 'modalities' or 'modal operators' instead but it's the same deal.
- amw-zero 3y agoThis is my favorite CS paper of all time. Reason being, it distills multiple different areas of CS down to one idea: state machines. Now I'm frequently able to map a complex idea down to a state machine, which makes all kinds of problems more manageable.