Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective / quote 28 of 28
Eden and Turner: program-script and program-process
In their ontology of computer programs [7], Eden and Turner focus on the differ- ence between code and process, which they understand as two main sub-categories of program, namely program-script and program-process. For them, the term ‘program’ is therefore polysomic: a program-script is a well-formed expression based on a Tu- ring-complete programming language, while a program-process is just the execution of a program-script. A concretization relationship links a program-script to the corre- sponding program-process. Another case of concretization relationship exists for them between a program specification (a kind of meta-program) and a program-script. Final- ly, they tend to consider software as synonymous with (and therefore as ambiguous as) program, and as posing “unique philosophical questions the observation that programs bridge between the abstract (e.g., Turing automata) and the concrete (desktop comput- ers, microwave ovens)”.