Constructing recursions by similarity

• Autor(a) principal: Galán,F. J.
• Data de Publicação: 2003
• Outros Autores: Cañete,J. M., Madrigal,V. J. Diaz
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-65002003000200003
• topic: specification transformation; program synthesis; correctness preservation; program specification

A formal specification can describe software models which are difficult to program. Transformational methods based on fold/unfold strategies have been proposed to palliate this problem. The objective of applying transformations is to filter out a new version of the specification where recursion may be introduced by a folding step. Among many problems, the "eureka" about when and how to define a new predicate is difficult to find automatically. We propose a new version of the folding rule which decides automatically how to introduce new predicates in a specification. Our method is based on finding similarities between formulas represented as parsing trees and it constitutes an assistance to the complex problem of deriving recursive specifications from non recursive ones.