Concept programming

Concept programming is a programming paradigm focusing on how concepts, that live in the programmer's mind, translate into representations that are found in the code space. This approach was introduced in 2001 by Christophe de Dinechin with the XL Programming Language.

Concept programming uses pseudo-metrics to evaluate the quality of code. They are called pseudo-metrics because they relate the concept space and the code space, with a clear understanding that the concept space cannot be formalized strictly enough for a real metric to be defined. Concept programming pseudo-metrics include:

The rule of equivalence is verified when the code behavior matches the original concept. This equivalence may break down in many cases. Integer overflow breaks the equivalence between the mathematical integer concept and the computerized approximation of the concept.

Many ways to break the equivalence have been given specific names, because they are very common:

To write code, concept programming recommends the following steps:

Many programming tools often lack in notational abilities, thus concept programming sometimes requires the use of preprocessors, domain-specific languages, or metaprogramming techniques.

XL is the only programming language known to date to be explicitly created for concept programming, but concept programming can be done in nearly any language, with varying degrees of success. Lisp and Forth (and their derivatives) are examples of pre-existing languages which lend themselves well to concept programming.

There are projects that exploit similar ideas to create code with higher level of abstraction. Among them are:

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