标题：TOWARD THE MATURITY OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: UNIVERSAL, FORMAL, AND MATHEMATICAL DEFINITION FOR VALUE AND OPERATION AS TWO BASIC CONCEPTS OF COMPUTING
期刊名称：Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
印刷版ISSN：1992-8645
电子版ISSN：1817-3195
出版年度：2013
卷号：57
期号：3
出版社：Journal of Theoretical and Applied
摘要：The presence of informal and redundant definitions of basic concepts of computing / programming prohibits the advances of software engineering. This problem is not addressed by all literatures of software engineering about formal methods. A paper by the present authors have provided partial solution by establishing Type and Object as two (out of four) disjoint basic concepts of computing and programming. This paper proposes the remaining two of the four basic concepts. With the substitution test, this paper shows that informality and redundancy of concepts in the widely referenced publications have led to another problem: the circularity of concept. Our proposed concepts have the opposite properties: formal, unique, and non-circular. The definitions are independent toward programming paradigms. The solution requires the formal definition for expression and operand, a semi-formal definition for statement; and the removal of synonyms like invoke, invocation, parameter and argument. Current standard of software engineering has five synonyms for operation, two synonyms for value, and two synonyms for operand. This paper proposes unique terms, proposes semi-formal and formal definitions for two basic concepts: operation and value. It gives way to advancing the software engineering as a mature discipline.
