Algebraic specification and functionals for transformational program and meta program development

Abstract

A methodology for PROgram development by SPECification and TRAnsformation is described. Formal requirement specifications are the basis for constructing correct and efficient programs by gradual transformation.A uniform treatment of algebraic specification is presented to formalise data, programs, transformation rules, in fact the program development process itself. It is shown by example that the development of meta programs, for example an efficient transformation algorithm incorporating the effect of a set of transformation rules, is analogous to program development: the transformation rules act as specifications for the transformation algorithms, and the negation of their applicability conditions as development goals.The paper focusses on the combination of functional programming and algebraic specification and reasoning, leading to a considerably higher degree of abstraction, avoiding much repetitive development effort, the use of homomorphic extension functionals, homomorphic properties for reasoning about correctness and optimisation, and the recursion schema of homomorphic extension as a program development strategy and as an induction schema for proofs.

A case study in transformational design of concurrent systems

“…Our work on transformational design is in the tradition of the work originated by Burstall and Darlington and pursued fur-9] ther to practical application in projects like CIP (standing for Computer-aided Intuition-guided Programming) [Ban87] and PttOSPECTRA (standing for PROgram development by SPECification and TRAnsformation) [Kri89]. While these approaches were concerned with conventional sequential programs, we study here concurrency and communication.…”