Knowledge-based programming: A survey of program design and construction techniques

Abstract

An application of artificial intelligence (AI) to the development of software is presented for the construction of efficient implementations of programs from formal high-level specifications. Central to this discussion is the notion of program development by means of program transformation. Using this methodology, a formal specification is compiled (either manually or automatically) into an efficient implementation by the repeated application of correctness-preserving, source-to-source transformations. The author considers techniques for data structure selection, the procedural representation of logic assertions, store-versus-compute, finite differencing, loop fusion, and algorithm design methods presented from the point of view of algorithm design and high-level program optimization.