Austin points out that uttering a promise creates an obligation in a public sense. This will be important also for computer programs, since a promise by the program may create an obligation, perhaps legal, on the part of the organization operating the program.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• For some purposes, it will be convenient to settle for specifications in terms of fulfilling internal commitments, and sometimes the public character of promises will have to be taken into account in the specifications.claim0.809
  Trade-off between internal and public obligations.
• Programs that engage in commercial transactions assume obligations on behalf of their owners in exchange for obligations assumed by other entities. It may be part of the specifications of an Elephant 2000 programs that these obligations are exchanged as intended, and this too can be expressed by a logical sentence.claim0.795
  Sixth abstract claim.
• The Elephant programmer in verifying his program need not show that the promise will be fulfilled because it was made. It is enough that he show it will be fulfilled.claim0.775
  Rejection of one of Dorschel's conditions for happy performance.
• A simple promise is an internal commitment to do something, i.e. to make some sentence true, and an output assertion that the commitment exists. Correctness requires that the assertion be truthful.claim0.772
  Definitional claim about promises.
• We also propose to handle external obligations in an abstract way.claim0.763
  Proposal for type 1/type 2 obligations.
• The fact that one process calls on other processes is not voluntary; it is essential to the nature of the system, just as in arithmetic.claim0.755
  Argues that sequence linkages reflect deep necessity, not option, for the system to work.
• Commitments are like specifications, but they are to be considered as dynamic, i.e. specific commitments are created as the program runs.claim0.755
  Dynamic nature of commitments.
• Proving that a program meets accomplishment specifications must be based on assumptions about the world, the information it makes available to the program and the effects of the program's actions as well as on facts about the program itself.claim0.751
  Claim about the nature of accomplishment verification.