Invited Talk: Intentional Programming - An Ecology for Abstractions

This talk will present Intentional Programming (IP). IP is a new way of representing a program as an abstract tree of nodes, where each node identifies what intention it is an instance of, and each intention defines, by user-definable methods, how it should look to the programmer and how it should be implemented. Because looks (formerly called "syntax") and implementation (formerly called "semantics") are infinitely variable, the only invariant is the computational intent in the programmer's mind, which the intention represents.

IP can be thought of as an ecology for abstractions. In contrast with programming languages, in IP the emergence of new abstractions does not invalidate existing legacy code. This talk will show how IP supports the speedier evolution of new domain-specific abstractions that simplify software engineering problems such as reuse, portability, and reliability.