9970909 Robert A. Paige The objectives of this research are to improve software productivity, reliability, and performance of complex software systems. The approach uses program transformations to turn very high level perspicuous problem specifications into efficient implementations. The transformations to be used include dominated convergence (for implementing fixed points efficiently), finite differencing (for replacing costly repeated calculations by less expensive incremental counterparts), data structure selection (for simulating associative access on a RAM in real time), and partial evaluation (for eliminating interpretive overhead and simplification). These transformations are to be implemented in a transformational system, which itself is to be transformed from an executable specification into efficient C code. Experiments to be conducted are expected to demonstrate how earlier results showing a five-fold increase in the productivity of efficient algorithm implementation in C in comparison to hand-coded C for small-scale examples can be extended to large-scale examples of C programs that might exceed 100,000 lines. If successful, the results are expected to have important scientific and economic impact on the development of algorithmic software with particular application to program analysis and transformation.
