Synthesis of Composition and Discrimination Operators for Divide-and-Conquer Logic Programs

This chapter gives a brief overview of our framework for stepwise synthesis of logic programs from examples and properties. Directives are extracted for the development of a particular synthesis mechanism whose steps are guided by a divide-and-conquer schema. It features deductive and inductive reasoning. Examples and properties are presented to it in a non-incremental fashion. The objectives and methods of its last steps (synthesis of composition and discrimination operators) are formalized, and illustrated on some sample problems. This chapter is organized as follows. After the introduction, three sample problems are presented in section 1.2. Sections 1.3 to 1.5 present the objectives and methods of some synthesis steps, and illustrate them on the sample problems. Some conclusions on the results are drawn in section 1.6, related work is stated, and future research directions are outlined.