Another general question to the list

Roel Wuyts wuyts at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Aug 15 18:09:20 UTC 2003


There was some work by Adele to help generate skeleton code from uses 
cases (in a case tool they implemented). I liked the idea, although I 
never really had a look at it... I forgot the exact name, but I guess 
people can fill in.

What I especially liked (compared to for example the formal approaches 
such as Z) is that they start from the requirements, and that the 
language to express the requirements is much easier than Z. Drawbacks, 
of course, is that you cannot do the nice proofs that the formal 
approaches offer.

PS: For domain-specific problems there is for example also things like 
Esterel (a language for real-time systems). They are formal, do certain 
proofs, but are simpler to master because they are domain-specific.

On Friday, Aug 15, 2003, at 20:02 Europe/Zurich, Alan Kay wrote:

> Hi Folks --
>
> An idea that has surfaced numerous times in various ways over the last 
> 40 years can be stated as a question:
>
> If unit tests are a good idea, then shouldn't we try to generate the 
> method code directly from them?
>
> In other words, there could be/should be a language in which one 
> programs in terms of the criteria to be achieved, and the system tries 
> to come up with code that meets those criteria. (The last one of these 
> that seemed really interesting was ART by Inference Corp (out of the 
> CMU context).)
>
> Anyone know of any interesting current work along these lines?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
> -- 
>
>
Roel Wuyts                                                   Software 
Composition Group
roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch                       University of Bern, 
Switzerland
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/
Board Member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org



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