A Language and Preprocessor for User-Controlled Generation of Synthetic Programs

作者：Chiu Alton; Garvey Joseph; Abdelrahman Tarek S^*

来源：Scientific Programming, 2017, 2017: 1046161.

DOI：10.1155/2017/1046161

We describeGenesis, a language for the generation of synthetic programs. The language allows users to annotate a template program to customize its code using statistical distributions and to generate program instances based on those distributions. This effectively allows users to generate programs whose characteristics vary in a statistically controlled fashion, thus improving upon existing programgenerators and alleviating the difficulties associated with ad hocmethods of programgeneration. We describe the language constructs, a prototype preprocessor for the language, and five case studies that show the ability of Genesis to express a range of programs. We evaluate the preprocessor's performance and the statistical quality of the samples it generates. We thereby show that Genesis is a useful tool that eases the expression and creation of large and diverse program sets.

• 出版日期2017