Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective / quote 23 of 28
A program is not its code, process or algorithm
we agree with Irmak that we cannot identify a program either with a code, a process, or an algorithm. The reason is that this view conflicts with common sense, since the same program usually consists of different codes at different times, as a result of updates4. What these differ- ent codes have in common is that they are selected as constituents of a program that is intended to implement the same algorithm. To account for this intuition, we need a