Weighted Programming. (arXiv:2202.07577v1 [cs.PL] CROSS LISTED)

We study weighted programming, a programming paradigm for specifying
mathematical models. More specifically, the weighted programs we investigate
are like usual imperative programs with two additional features: (1)
nondeterministic branching and (2) weighting execution traces. Weights can be
numbers but also other objects like words from an alphabet, polynomials, formal
power series, or cardinal numbers. We argue that weighted programming as a
paradigm can be used to specify mathematical models beyond probability
distributions (as is done in probabilistic programming).

We …

arxiv pl programming