Design principles for an interactive program derivation system

Abstract

The main design principles of an interactive program transformation system called FOCUS are outlined. Its important characteristics are its human-oriented deduction techniques based replacement, emphasis on small search spaces, and the use of a tree structure to organize program derivations. The tree structure presents to the user a static picture of the derivation process and promotes flexibility in the development of derivations. The system keeps track of dependencies between different parts of derivations, and records the derivation activity for later use in automatic replay.