Power of brute-force search in strongly-typed inductive functional programming automation

Abstract

A successful case of applying brute-force search to functional programming automation is presented and compared with a conventional genetic programming method. From the information of the type and the property that should be satisfied, this algorithm is able to find automatically the shortest Haskell program using the set of function components (or library) configured beforehand, and there is no need to design the library every time one requests a new functional program. According to the presented experiments, programs consisted of several function applications can be found within some seconds even if we always use the library designed for general use. In addition, the proposed algorithm can efficiently tell the number of possible functions of given size that are consistent with the given type, and thus can be a tool to evaluate other methods like genetic programming by providing the information of thebaseline performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.