Automating Software Reuse

ment, whose objective is to empower domain experts themselves to specialize AM-PHION to an application domain. It is meant to be the automatic programming analogue of application generator generator technology. META-AMPHION will include an extension of the current user interface to guide domain experts in creating and extending a domain theory (in fact, the current user interface is already suitable for developing component specifications), a subsystem to check that software components are specified correctly in a domain theory through verification against the component code, a subsystem to check for missing axioms, and a subsystem to automatically operationalize a domain theory for efficient deductive synthesis. To make it feasible for domain experts to generate AMPHION applications, they must be able to specify their knowledge of a domain without becoming experts in the operational semantics of automated reasoning technology, especially the intricacies of general purpose theorem provers. Our approach to operationalizing a declarative domain theory for efficient de-ductive synthesis is conceptually to apply AMPHION at the meta-level: given a meta-theory of program synthesis and a domain theory for a particular application domain , Meta-AMPHION constructs an efficient domain-specific program synthesis system from components that implement specialized inference procedures. The components that are formalized at the Meta-AMPHION level are decision procedures whose applicability conditions are indexed through a hierarchy of abstract mathematical structures. Meta-AMPHION analyses the domain theory and finds instances of these mathematical structures. It then substitutes instances of the corresponding decision procedures for sets of axioms in the domain theory, thereby greatly speeding up inferences related to those sets of axioms. It is not necessary to substitute decision procedures for all the axioms in a domain theory, but to be effective it is necessary to eliminate sources of exponential search. Meta-AMPHION is described in [VanBaalen and Lowry 95].