Zoea -- Composable Inductive Programming Without Limits
This addresses the long-standing goal in computer science of scalable automatic software generation, potentially impacting software development broadly.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically generating software from specifications resembling functional tests, presenting Zoea, a language that can generate commercially valuable, arbitrarily large and complex programs through composition.
Automatic generation of software from some form of specification has been a long standing goal of computer science research. To date successful results have been reported for the production of relatively small programs. This paper presents Zoea which is a simple programming language that allows software to be generated from a specification format that closely resembles a set of automated functional tests. Zoea incorporates a number of advances that enable it to generate software that is large enough to have commercial value. Zoea also allows programs to be composed to form still larger programs. As a result Zoea can be used to produce software of any size and complexity. An overview of the core Zoea language is provided together with a high level description of the symbolic AI based Zoea compiler.