Invited application paper: program generation considered easy

  • Authors:

  • Sam Kamin

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Programmers frequently write program generators using the simple model of programs as text. The essence of this approach is its lack of structure. For this reason, it gets no respect from academic researchers. But the flip side of lacking structure is freedom from restrictions. We argue that the latter is important, and perhaps essential, in finding a willing audience for program generation among working programmers. Jumbo is a system for producing run-time program generators, which is designed to offer the programmer a "programs as strings" model to as great an extent as possible, though some constraints are inevitable. We show by several examples that these constraints still allow for both a natural and a powerful program generation model. We then discuss how the approach taken by Jumbo, though possessing less structure than some competing methods, still raises scientific problems that ought to be of interest to researchers in this area.