Towards a new concept of software

The article develops three inter-related ideas: that a ‘well structured’ software system may be understood as a compressed representation of its inputs and its outputs; that software design may be seen as a process of information compression; and that the execution of software may also be understood as a process of information compression. Information compression may be achieved by the comparison or matching of patterns, the merging or unification of patterns which are the same, and a search through the space of possible unifications to find the set or sets giving the most compression. A prototype has been developed of a ‘new generation’ computing system which is dedicated to information compression by pattern matching, unification and search. Examples from the prototype are presented to illustrate the themes of the article. These ideas can mean increased efficiency in software development and increased quality in the resulting product. Planned developments of the ideas are briefly described.