QuickFill : travailler plus pour générer moins en synthèse de programmes
Abstract
In order to facilitate the execution of repetitive tasks, program synthesis approaches have
been developed. Program synthesis consists in automatically inferring programs that satisfy
a user's intention. FlashFill, in Excel, is the most famous. In FlashFill the user's intention
is represented by examples, i.e. pairs (input, output). FlashFill explores a very large search
space of programs and thus may require a large runtime and infer many programs, some of
which work on the given examples but do not capture the user's intent. In this paper we
present Quickfill, an approach that reduces the space of programs to infer by enriching the user
specifications. We show that with this approach, it is often possible to give fewer examples than
with the original FlashFill algorithm, and that the proportion of correct programs obtained is
greater in most cases.