Synthesizing Imperative Programs from Examples

Sunbeom So, Tae-Hyoung Choi, Jun Jung, Hakjoo Oh

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2017.44.9.986

In this paper, we present a method for synthesizing imperative programs from input-output examples. Given (1) a set of input-output examples, (2) an incomplete program, and (3) variables and integer constants to be used, the synthesizer outputs a complete program that satisfies all of the given examples. The basic synthesis algorithm enumerates all possible candidate programs until the solution program is found (enumerative search). However, it is too slow for practical use due to the huge search space. To accelerate the search speed, our approach uses code optimization and avoids unnecessary search for the programs that are syntactically different but semantically equivalent. We have evaluated our synthesis algorithm on 20 introductory programming problems, and the results show that our method improves the speed of the basic algorithm by 10x on average.