Automated Synthesis of Data

Research into the development of software tools that support formal methods is aimed at simplifying and providing assistance during the development of correct software. We have developed the Seed system that uses techniques amenable to automation in order to assist a user in the correct development of the building blocks of a large software system from user-supplied formal speciications. Seed accepts a formal speciication of a problem written in predicate logic and generates annotated program source code satisfying the speciication. The rules for choosing which programming language structures to synthesize are contained in a rule base; background knowledge and domain-speciic information are entered into a fact base. During synthesis, Seed uses the fact base to disambiguate rule applications. In addition to primitive programming language constructs, such as assignment, alternative and iterative statements, Seed is capable of synthesizing recursive and non-recursive procedures and functions, as well as abstract data types. This paper describes the details of the synthesis of abstract data types using the Seed system.