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