- Abstract:
-
Programming-by-example (PBE) systems attempt to generate programs by learning a task from the user's actions. It is a field with great potential, but little success so far. Most existing PBE systems are both highly specialised and quite limited in the tasks they can accomplish. This paper sets out a new approach to PBE that is general-purpose and can handle variables, branching and loops. It could therefore offer non-experts a genuine alternative to conventional programming. Our approach makes use of automated reasoning techniques, and is based on work in interactive theorem proving using model-instance based reasoning (where general theorems are proved by considering specific cases). The `proof-as-programs' paradigm (where theorem provers are used to generate programs) leads us to propose that model-instance based reasoning can be applied to program generation. The proposed method has the added benefit that - because of the link to an underlying logic - certain types of common bug cannot occur. We are currently working on an implementation for the domain of XML object manipulation.
- Copyright:
- 2004 by The University of Edinburgh. All Rights Reserved
- Links To Paper
- No links available
- Bibtex format
- @Misc{EDI-INF-RR-0207,
- author = {
Daniel Winterstein
},
- title = {A Proposal for Interactive Program Generation},
- year = 2003,
- month = {Oct},
- }
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