Transformation-Based Database Engineering

Modelling software design as the systematic transformation of formal specifications into efficient programs and building CASE tools that support it has long been considered one of the ultimate goals of software engineering. For instance, Balzer (1981) and Fikas (1985) consider that the process of developing a program [can be] formalized as a set of correctness-preserving transformations [...] aimed to compilable and efficient program production. In this context, according to Partsch and Steinbrüggen (1983), a transformation is a relation between two program schemes P and P’ (a program scheme is the [parameterized] representation of a class of related programs; a program of this class is obtained by instantiating the scheme parameters). It is said to be correct if a certain semantic relation holds between P and P’.