Progress in the field of knowledge-based programming has been held up because of the tremendous investment needed to build an experimental testbed. The objective of this project is to provide an open research system to other investigators by preparing the Kestrel Interactive Development System (KIDS) for distribution to educational and research institutions and to provide ongoing maintenance and support to off- site users. KIDS is a knowledge-based system that supports the development of correct and efficient programs from formal specifications. KIDS' features include formal specifications, highly automated support for correctness-preserving program transformations, ease of use through a point-and-click-style graphic interface, and representations for a wide varity of programming knowledge. The system has components for performing algorithm design, deductive inference, program simplificaiton, partial evaluation, finite differencing optimizations, data type refinement and other development operations. Generally KIDS can be viewed as a system for performing semantics-preserving transformations on complex linguistically- expressed objects.
