ABSTRACT
Production of software is costly and error prone, and the most important means of production are scarce. Therefore there exists a need to circumvent this costly manual production process. Analogies from classical engineering suggest that by building up a catalogue of standard components and construction techniques, whose characteristics are well documented, the cost of new construction projects can be greatly reduced. The desire to avoid writing the same section of code more than once led to the invention of macros and subroutines. These allow the reuse of common code sequences, but the reuse is confined to a single author, or at most a single project. This is too restricted to bring relief to the industry. A Wide Spectrum Language is a language which covers the whole spectrum of operations from low-level programming constructs to high level abstract specifications expressed in non-executable form. In a wide spectrum language is developed specifically to form the foundation for a transformation theory.
