Automatic implementation of abstract specifications

[debray@arizona.UUCP]

In article <1337@ogcvax.UUCP>, dinucci@ogcvax.UUCP (David C. DiNucci) writes:
> In his Phd thesis defense here at Oregon Graduate Center, Dennis
> Volpano presented his package that did basically this.  Though certainly
> not of production quality, the system was able to take an abstraction
> of a stack and, as a separate module, a description of a language and
> data types within the language (in this case integer array and file,
> if I remember correctly), and produce code which was an instantiation
> of the abstraction - a stack implemented as an array or as a file.

I believe there was quite a bit of work on this sort of stuff at MIT
earlier in the decade.  E.g. there was a PhD thesis [ca. 1983] by
M. K. Srivas titled "Automatic Implementation of Abstract Data Types"
(or something close to it).  The idea, if I remember correctly, was to
take sets of equations specifying the "source" ADT (e.g. stack) and the
"target" ADT (e.g. array), and map the source into the target.
-- 
Saumya Debray		CS Department, University of Arizona, Tucson

     internet:   debray@arizona.edu
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