From Visual Specifications to Executable Code

Conceptual analysis in many domains uses visual representation of objects and relationships. This is obviously true for engineering domains where graphics is often a part of design documentation. It is true for software engineering as well, where we have well-established graphical representation of various software artifacts. Attempts are made to formalize the semantics of visual representations, in particular, the UML is intended to be a language with quite clear semantics [1]. However, the difficulty lies in the implementation of such languages, i.e. in developing tools which enable us to use the languages with high degree of automation. In the present paper we give an example of automatic usage of visual specifications. To be able to automate software processes, we should have efficiently usable formal methods for the processes. Developments in logic programming, functional programming and software verification show that automatically usable formal methods have reached sufficient maturity to be used in software practice. We demonstrate the usage of a program synthesis method which relies on a restricted logic of intuitionistic propositional calculus, but has high performance and is applicable to large specifications. We describe a layered software development environment which provides visual tools for domain analysis. Result of the domain analysis is a visual specification language directly implementable by means of the visual tools.