Program Transformation: Theoretical Foundations and Basic Techniques. Part 1

Over the last three decades the program transformation methodology has been proved to be a powerful technique for deriving programs from specifications, verifying program properties, specializing programs w.r.t. their context of use, and deriving more efficient program versions from less efficient ones. The transformation methodology has been first proposed in the area of functional programming by R. M. Burstall and J. Darlington in their seminal paper “A Transformation System for Developing Recursive Programs” [1]. Then H. Tamaki and T. Sato applied the transformation methodology also to the area of logic programming [4] and since then, many other papers and research efforts have been devoted to the development of a variety of approaches to program transformation in functional and logic programming and in other programming paradigms as well. For a survey which illustrates the basic ideas of program transformation and covers the early work in the area, the reader may refer to [3]. More recently, people have been considering the application of transformation techniques to the case of “programming in the large”. Developments in this direction may be found in the companion Special Issue of Science of Computer Programming [2] edited by Ralf Lämmel. That Special Issue is more oriented towards the applications of the program transformation methodology in software engineering.