Tq: A Language For Specifying Programming Problems

A central problem in designing a specification language for programming problems is that of making it easy to use by those people with very little or no knowledge of programming. This paper describes a specification language which has been designed with that idea in mind. The language has sufficient power to represent a large class of programming problems, is easy to use, and problems represented in it are directly legible. The language combines surface forms with semantic primitives underlying natural language. This results in a representation that, although far from natural language surface forms, is easily legible even by those people who have had a minimum exposure to the language. © 1991 Academic Press Limited