Transforming a Program into a Specication M.Ward

There has been much research in recent years on the problems of program and system development but very little work has been done on the problems of maintaining developed programs. This is despite the fact that for many years it has been well-known that maintenance consumes the largest percentage of the programming budget. We apply the techniques of program transformation to a published program which was written in such a way that the structure and eect of the program are very hard to discern. This will reveal the true structure of the program and enable its eect to be summarised as a specication. The method is language-independent and so can be used with a wide variety of programming languages, the same method can be used to derive a program from a specication, transform a program from one language to another, and (as illustrated here), to transform a program into a specication