Automatic Programming: A Tutorial on Formal Methodologies ALAN W. BIERMANN

Automatic computer programming or automatic programming occurs whenever a machine aids in this process. The amount of automatic programming that is occurring is a variable quantity that depends on how much aid the human is given. There are a number of dimensions on which the level of help can be measured including the level of the language used by the human, the amount of informality allowed, the degree to which the system is told what to do rather than how to do it, and the efficiency of the resulting code. Thus we usually say that there is a higher degree of automatic programming whenever a higher level language is used, less precision is required of the human, the input instructions are more declarative and less procedural, and the quality of the object code is better. The technologies of automatic programming thus include the fields that help move the programming experience along any of these dimensions: algorithm synthesis, programming language research, compiler theory, human factors, and others. This paper will concentrate on only the first of these topics, formal methodologies for the automatic construction of algorithms from fragmentary information. The formal methodologiest have been separated into two categories, synthesis from formal specifications and synthesis from examples. In the former case, it is assumed a specification is given for the target program with adequate domain information so that the target program can be derived in a series of logical steps.