On automating the construction of programs.

Abstract

An experimental system for automatically generating certain simple kinds of programs is described. The programs constructed are expressed in a subset of ALGOL containing assignments, function calls, conditional statements, while loops, and non-recursive procedure calls. The input is an environment of primitive programs and programming methods specified in a lnaugage currently used to define the semantics of the output programming language. The system has been used to generate programs for symbolic manipulation, robot control, every day planning, and computing arithmetical functions.