A logical framework to model software development by multiple agents following a common specification.

In this paper, we address modelling program development by multiple different programmers (or programming teams) who work in different settings (programming languages or reasoning frameworks) but follow a common specification. After consideration of some philosophical issues regarding program development, including its similarities and dissimilarities with scientific theorizing, we extend a logical framework built to describe scientific theorizing in relativist settings: our extensions add the ability of reasoning about programs, the iterative process of their generation and their specifications. We are thus able to use the framework in order to make a first step towards examining at an abstract level the problem of translatability between the programs produced by program generators, by defining a notion of translation between the outputs of program generators and proving that there is such a (trivial) translation when two program generators follow the same specification reliably (in a specific sense of reliability). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]