Publisher's Synopsis
This book contains papers and discussion transcripts giving a good survey of the state of the art in deriving programs from their specifications by algebraic means. As opposed to the various refinement calculi for procedural programs, the setting here is mostly that of functional or, to cope with nondeterminacy, relational languages. First approaches to the classification of specifications allow the systematic solution of very general classes of problems. Also, the analysis of the structure of developments is shown in several examples. Impressive work is presented in the area of automating standard derivation tasks, both concerning (semi-)automatic construction of efficient data type implementations and automatic transformation of functional specifications into efficient code. Further papers address automatic program synthesis, rapid prototyping and transformational derivation of parallel algorithms.
