Specification-based code generation

The authors review strategies for designing directly implemented algebraic specifications and discuss code generation. They introduce a small specification language that supports the use of the design strategies and facilitates the perception and understanding of the various components of a specification. They review the binary choice and the recursive reduction strategies that can be employed during the design of an algorithm expressed in the authors' small language. These strategies are the basis for rapid and very reliable abstraction design. The authors propose a family of translation schemes for obtaining executable code in one of several programming languages representative of different models of computations; the code is obtained from algebraic specifications that possess the properties achieved via the proposed design strategies. Key components of a prototypical implementation are outlined.<
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