Program transformation

About: Program transformation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2468 publications have been published within this topic receiving 73415 citations.

Abstracting a specification from code

Abstract: Much of the work on developing program transformation systems has concentrated on systems to assist in program development. However, the four separate surveys carried out between 1977 and 1990 (Foster and Kiekuth, 1990; Lientz and Swanson, 1980; Morton, 1988; Nosek and Palvia, 1990), summarized in Foster (1991), show that between 40% and 60% of all commercial software effort is devoted to software maintenance rather than the development of new systems. In this paper we describe a joint project between the University of Durham and CSM Ltd to develop a method and tool for reverse-engineering and software maintenance based on program transformation theory. We present an example which illustrates how such a tool can extract a high-level abstract specification from the low-level source code of a program by a process of formal program transformation based on a theory of program equivalence (Ward, 1989a). All the code-level reverse-engineering of the example program was carried out on the prototype tool with the resulting code pasted directly into the paper.

A simple inductive synthesis methodology and its applications

Abstract: Given a high-level specification and a low-level programming language, our goal is to automatically synthesize an efficient program that meets the specification. In this paper, we present a new algorithmic methodology for inductive synthesis that allows us to do this.We use Second Order logic as our generic high level specification logic. For our low-level languages we choose small application-specific logics that can be immediately translated into code that runs in expected linear time in the worst case.We explain our methodology and provide examples of the synthesis of several graph classifiers, e.g, linear-time tests of whether the input graph is connected, acyclic, etc. In another set of applications we automatically derive many finite differencing expressions equivalent to ones that Paige built by hand in his thesis [Pai81]. Finally we describe directions for automatically combining such automatically generated building blocks to synthesize efficient code implementing more complicated specifications.The methods in this paper have been implemented in Python using the SMT solver Z3 [dMB].

The KeY Platform for Verification and Analysis of Java Programs

Abstract: The KeY system offers a platform of software analysis tools for sequential Java. Foremost, this includes full functional verification against contracts written in the Java Modeling Language. But the approach is general enough to provide a basis for other methods and purposes: (i) complementary validation techniques to formal verification such as testing and debugging, (ii) methods that reduce the complexity of verification such as modularization and abstract interpretation, (iii) analyses of non-functional properties such as information flow security, and (iv) sound program transformation and code generation. We show that deductive technology that has been developed for full functional verification can be used as a basis and framework for other purposes than pure functional verification. We use the current release of the KeY system as an example to explain and prove this claim.