A Language and Preprocessor for User-Controlled Generation of Synthetic Programs

Abstract EN

We describe Genesis, a language for the generation of synthetic programs.

The language allows users to annotate a template program to customize its code using statistical distributions and to generate program instances based on those distributions.

This effectively allows users to generate programs whose characteristics vary in a statistically controlled fashion, thus improving upon existing program generators and alleviating the difficulties associated with ad hoc methods of program generation.

We describe the language constructs, a prototype preprocessor for the language, and five case studies that show the ability of Genesis to express a range of programs.

We evaluate the preprocessor’s performance and the statistical quality of the samples it generates.

We thereby show that Genesis is a useful tool that eases the expression and creation of large and diverse program sets.