Automatic parallel programming using the descartes specification language

Abstract

Automatic programming can be defined as developing software in a high abstraction level. The definition of automatic programming is not precise because what is meant by automatic programming is changing over time. The goal of automatic programming has the programmer set the specifications of a program and the computer generate the source code of that program. There exists a group of specification languages that vary in their properties; the Descartes specification language is known to be comprehensible and easily constructible. Descartes represents the specifications by defining a system's inputs and outputs, as well as the relationship between these as functions. Descartes has been extended to support concurrent systems. These features made Descartes to be a good basis to build this research effort on. This research effort studied automatic programming approaches and created a shortcut between specifications and implementation with all its benefits. This research created a way to transform Descartes specifications into C source code automatically. Automatic programming can apply to all fields of knowledge that can be automated; therefore, the scope of this research project was restricted to a few case studies that involve parallel programming.