Program developments

Abstract

otherwise, or lo republish. requires a fee and/or specific permission, 'g 1983 ACM 0001-0762/63/1100-0902 75(E development-ibe constructed during the development process explaining the resulting implementation to future maintainers of the specification. The overall goal of our work is to develop a language for capturing and explaining these developments and the resulting implementations. This language must be capable of expressing: 1) the implementor's goal structure; 2) all program manipulations necessary for implementation: and 3) optimization and plans of such optimizations. We discuss the documentation requirements of the development process and then describe a prototype system for constructing and maintaining this documentation information. Finalhi we indicate many remaining, open issues and the directions to be taken in the pursuit of adequate solutions. 902 Communications of the ACM I98J Number 1! Communjcalions of the ACM November 19S3 Volume^ Number H '^itt]

Specifications in software prototyping

“…2). Meaning-preserving transformations have been studied extensively [2±4, 11,13,14,22]. However, changes to the functionality are sometimes also needed to optimize a design.…”

Algebraic specification and functionals for transformational program and meta program development

“…Various authors have stressed the need for a formalisation of the software development process: the need for an automatically generated transcript of a development "history" to allow re-play upon re-development when requirements have changed, containing goals of the development, design decisions taken, and alternatives discarded but relevant for re-development [29]. A development script is thus a formal object that does not only represent a documentation of the past but is a plan for future developments.…”

“…It can be used to abstract from a particular development to a class of similar developments, a development method, incorporating a certain strategy. Approaches to formalise development descriptions contain a kind of development program [29], regular expressions over elementary steps [30], functional abstraction [31] and composition of logical inference rules [32,33].…”

Object-oriented programming with class dictionaries

“…Kristensen et al [18] introduce an algebra of program fragments. The POPART system treats grammars as objects [39]. The synthesizer generator project also uses a grammar based approach [36].…”