Dynamic Programming as a Software Component

Dynamic programming is usually regarded as a design technique, where each application is designed as an individual program. This contrasts with other techniques such as linear programming, where there exists a single generic program that solves all instances. From a software engineering perspective, the lack of a generic solution to dynamic programming is somewhat unsatisfactory. It would be much preferable if dynamic programming could be understood as a software component, where the ideas common to all its applications are explicit in shared code. In this paper, we argue that such a component does indeed exist, at least for a large class of applications in which the decision process is a sequential scan of the input sequence. We also assess the suitability of C++ for expressing this type of generic program, and argue that the simplicity offered by lazy functional programming is preferable. In particular, functional programs can be manipulated as algebraic expressions. The paper does not present any novel results: it is an introduction to recent work on the formalisation of algorithmic paradigms in software engineering. Key-Words: Dynamic programming; sequential decision process; software component; functional programming; algebra of programming; program derivation.