There are lots of papers, dating back to the 1970s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/publications/date/algprog.html http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/publicat

There are lots of papers, dating back to the 1970s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/publications/date/algprog.html http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/publications/date/algprog.... Actually Dijkstra also was a proponent of deriving programs, it's discussed in his "Discipline of programming" and 30 years ago there was some interest in this, with lots of papers published, but it never gained much traction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_derivation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_derivation