Storyboard programming of data structure manipulations : a picture is worth 20 lines of code

Abstract

We introduce Storyboard Programming, a new programming model that harnesses the programmer's visual intuition about a problem to synthesize a correct implementation. The motivation for our technique comes from the domain of data-structure manipulations. In this domain, programmers often think in terms of abstract graphical visualizations but have a hard time translating that intuition into low-level pointer manipulating code. We aim to bridge this gap and show that it is possible to derive the low-level implementation automatically from the graphical specifications with little additional input from the programmer. The storyboard in our programming model consists of a series of scenarios which show how the data-structure evolves under different conditions. We present two novel algorithms to synthesize the code from the storyboards. The algorithms derive an abstract domain and a set of correctness conditions automatically from the storyboards. The synthesizer uses the abstract domain to perform abstraction guided combinatorial synthesis. The resulting program is guaranteed to satisfy the correctness conditions derived from the storyboard, and to conform to the high-level structure specified by the programmer. We have implemented our framework successfully on top of the SKETCH system. Our implementation is capable of synthesizing several interesting data-structure manipulations such as insertion, deletion, rotation, reversal over linked list and binary search tree data structures.