Diagrams for software synthesis
Richard K. Jullig, Yellamraju V. Srinivas · 2002
The authors describe the formal environment at Kesteral for synthesizing programs. The authors show that straightforward formalization, persistently applied at all levels of system description and system derivation, produces a scalable architecture for a synthesis environment. The primitive building blocks for framework are specifications, which encapsulate types and operations, and specification arrows, which are relations between specifications. The design of a system is represented as a diagram of specifications and arrows. Synthesis steps manipulate such diagrams, for example, by adding design detail to some specification, or by building new diagrams. A design history is a diagram of diagrams. Thus, they have a formal, knowledge-based, and machine-supported counterpart to such software engineering methodologies as CASE and OOP.>