Generative metaprogramming

Recent advances in Software Engineering have reduced the cost of coding programs at the expense of increasing the complexity of program synthesis, i.e. metaprograms, which when executed, will synthesize a target program. The traditional cycle of configuringlinking-compiling, now needs to be supplemented with additional transformation steps that refine and enhance an initial specification until the target program is obtained. So far, these synthesis processes are based on error-prone, hand-crafted scripting. To depart from this situation, this paper addresses generative metaprogramming, i.e. the generation of program-synthesis metaprograms from declarative specifications. To this end, we explore (i) the (meta) primitives for program synthesis, (ii) the architecture that dictates how these primitives can be intertwined, and (iii) the declarative specification of the metaprogram from which the code counterpart is generated. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.11 [Software Architecture...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GPCE
• Authors: Salvador Trujillo, Maider Azanza, Oscar Díaz
• Keywords: Generative Metaprogramming, GPCE 2007, Program Synthesis, Programming Languages, Target Program