Developing and reasoning about probabilistic programs in <i>pGCL</i>

As explained in Chapter 1, Dijkstra’s guarded-command language, which we call GCL, was introduced as an intellectual framework for rigorous reasoning about imperative sequential programs; one of its novelties was that it contained explicit “demonic” nondeterminism, representing abstraction from (or ignorance of) which of two program fragments will be executed. By introducing probabilistic nondeterminism into GCL, we provide a means with which also probabilistic programs can be rigorously developed and reasoned about.33 page(s