Model-Based Development: Applications

Chapter 3. Generalization, Inheritance, Genericity, and Polymorphism

So doth the greater glory dim the less: A substitute shines brightly as a king Until a king be by, and then his state Empties itself, as doth an inland brook Into the main of waters.

—Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The basic operations of a Turing machine may be quite general in application and a boon to hardware developers, but it is extremely tedious to construct a program using only those basic operations. Most of the major advances related to languages and modeling have been directed at substituting abstract constructs that are more succinct for common combinations of Turing instructions.

That militant substitution began when BAL substituted instruction mnemonics ...