Research on Semantically Based Program-Design Environments: The Ergo Project in 1988
Peter Lee, Frank Pfenning, John Reynolds, Gene Rollins, Dana Scott · 1988
This report describes the current state of the Ergo Project starting with a discussion of background to the research area, presenting a review of past activities, and then detailing thoughts and proposals for future work. Principally, the research of the Ergo Project is aimed at improving the ability of programmers to develop and maintain provably correct, adaptable, and efficient software. The report argues that an approach to software development is needed in which the results of the development process embody in a formal way the wealth of design information that is lost in current development practices. The project pursues a Design-Based Approach in which not only are the specifications of problems and the implementations of their solutions recorded, but also the design decisions that link them are concretely represented and manipulated. Specifically, we recommend a methodology of inferential programming and explain how work over the last three years has resulted in valuable general insights into the nature of program design. Future research comprises taking steps towards the creation of an integrated Experimental Program-Design Environment that provides specifically for the retention, formalization, and reuse of design information. Such an environment would support inferential programming as well as other design-based approaches to program development, and it will be adaptable to a wide range of languages, development styles and proof systems.