Program transformation is a means to formally develop efficient programs from lucid specifications. A representative sample of the diverse range of program transformation research is classified into several different approaches based upon the motivations for and styles of constructing such formal developments. Individual techniques for supporting construction of developments are also surveyed, and are related to the various approaches.

The goal of program transformation is to improve efficiency while preserving meaning. One of the best known transformation techniques is Burstall and Darlington's unfold-fold method. Unfortunately the unfold-fold method itself guarantees neither improvement in efficiency nor total-correctness. The correctness problem for unfold-fold is an instance of a strictly more general problem: transformation by locally equivalence-preserving steps does not necessarily preserve (global) equivalence. This paper presents a condition for the total correctness of transformations on recursive programs, which, for the first time, deals with higher-order functional languages (both strict and non-strict) including lazy data structures. The main technical result is an improvement theorem which says that if the local transformation steps are guided by certain optimisation concerns (a fairly natural condition for a transformation), then correctness of the transformation follows. The improvement theorem make...

We present a general strategy for stepwise, sound and progressive synthesis of logic programs from specifications by examples and properties. We particularize this to schema-guided synthesis, and state a generic synthesis theorem. We justify some design choices for the development of a particular synthesis mechanism that is guided by a Divide-and-Conquer schema, is inductive and deductive, is interactive, and features a non-incremental presentation of examples. Some crucial steps of this mechanism are explained, and illustrated by a sample synthesis. We draw some conclusions on our results so far, state some related work, and outline future research directions.

Wadler's deforestation algorithm eliminates intermediate data structures from functional programs. To be suitable for inclusion in a compiler, it must terminate on all programs. Several techniques to ensure termination of deforestation on all first-order programs are known, but a technique for higher-order programs was only recently introduced by Hamilton, and elaborated and implemented in the Glasgow Haskell compiler by Marlow. We introduce a new technique for ensuring termination of deforestation on all higher-order programs that allows useful transformation steps prohibited in Hamilton's and Marlowe's techniques. 1 Introduction Lazy, higher-order, functional programming languages lend themselves to a certain style of programming which uses intermediate data structures [28]. Example 1 Consider the following program. letrec a = x; y:case x of [] ! y (h : t) ! h : a t y in u; v; w: a (a u v) w The term u; v; w:a (a u v) w appends the three lists u, v, and w. Appending u and v ...

. Deforestation is a transformation of functional programs to remove intermediate data structures. It is based on outermost unfolding of function calls where folding occurs when unfolding takes place within the same nested function call. Since unrestricted unfolding may encounter arbitrarily many terms, a termination analysis has to determine those subterms where unfolding is possibly dangerous. We show that such an analysis can be obtained from a control flow analysis by an extension with integer constraints -- essentially at no loss in efficiency. 1 Introduction The key idea of flow analysis for functional languages is to define an abstract meaning in terms of program points , i.e., subexpressions of the program possibly evaluated during program execution [Pa95]. Such analysises have been invented for tasks like type recovery [Sh91], binding time analysis [Co93], or safety analysis [PS95]. Conceptually, these are closely related to A. Deutsch's store--based alias analysis [D...

Since almost 30 years software production has to face two major problems: the cost of non-standard software, caused by long development times and the constant need for maintenance, and a lack of confidence in the reliability of software. Recent accidents like the crash of KAL’s 747 in August 1997 or the

This paper is a survey of the current state of the art of research on methods for formal software development. The scope of this paper is necessarily restricted so as to avoid discussion of a great many approaches at a very superficial level. First, although some of the ideas discussed below could be (and have been) applied to hardware development as well as to software development, this topic will not be treated here. Second, the special problems involved in the development of concurrent systems will not be discussed here although again many of the approaches mentioned below could be applied in this context. Third, no attempt is made to treat programming methodologies such as Jackson's method and program development systems such as the MIT Programmer's Apprentice which are not formally based. Finally, this survey does not claim to be fully exhaustive although an attempt has been made to cover most of the main approaches. Many of the technical details of the different approaches discussed have been glossed over or simplified for the purposes of this presentation; full details may be found in the cited references.

We describe a formalization of the meta-mathematics of programming in a higher-order logical calculus as a means to create verifiably correct implementations of program synthesis tools. Using reflected notions of programming concepts we can specify the actions of synthesis methods within the object language of the calculus and prove formal theorems about their behavior. The theorems serve as derived inference rules implementing the kernel of these methods in a flexible, safe, efficient and comprehensible way. We demonstrate the advantages of using formal mathematics in support of program development systems through an example in which we formalize a strategy for deriving global search algorithms from formal specifications.

this paper, and the referees for their very helpful comments and constructive suggestions which greatly improved an earlier version of this paper. References

We investigate the soundness of a specialisation technique due to Scherlis, expression procedures, in the context of a higher-order non-strict functional language. An expression procedure is a generalised procedure construct providing a contextually specialised definition. The addition of expression procedures thereby facilitates the manipulation and specialisation of programs. In the expression procedure approach, programs thus generalised are transformed by means of three key transformation rules: composition, application and abstraction. Arguably, the most notable, yet most overlooked feature of the expression procedure approach to transformation, is that the transformation rules always preserve the meaning of programs. This is in contrast to the unfold-fold transformation rules of Burstall and Darlington. In Scherlis' thesis, this distinguishing property was shown to hold for a strict first-order language. Rules for call-by-name evaluation order were stated but not proved correct....