The sketching approach to program synthesis

Abstract

Sketching is a new form of localized software synthesis that aims to bridge the gap between a programmer's high-level insights about a problem and the computer's ability to manage low-level details. In sketching, the programmer uses partial programs to describe the desired implementation strategy, and leaves the low-level details of the implementation to an automated synthesis procedure. This paper describes the sketching approach to program synthesis, including the details of the Sketch language and synthesizer. The paper will then describe some of the techniques that make synthesis from sketches possible, and will close with a brief discussion of open problems in programmer guided synthesis. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.