Intent Preserving Generation of Diverse and Idiomatic (Code-)Artifacts

TL;DR

The paper introduces a generic approach for automatically generating diverse, idiomatic, and related programming artifacts by composing abstract building blocks, simplifying the creation of varied task descriptions and solutions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method that uses abstract building blocks to generate multiple connected artifacts automatically, enhancing adaptability and reducing manual effort.

Findings

Enables automatic generation of related artifacts from a common abstract description

Produces diverse and idiomatic code snippets for programming exercises

Simplifies the creation of task-related artifacts in automated programming environments

Abstract

When automatically generating programming exercise tasks one often also needs to automatically generate programs. At the very least when providing sample solutions is part of automated feedback. But programs can also be used as part of the exercise task description to communicate a task's requirements. Writing good program generators that produce varied yet idiomatic code while being easily adaptable for new tasks is challenging. The challenges are intensified if task generation requires additional artifacts, like a more general behavior specification for testing or additional textual descriptions. Manually writing generators for multiple different but strongly related artifacts gets complicated quickly. We present an approach where instead of writing monolithic generators for multiple connected artifacts one specifies a small set of abstract building blocks and for each such building block defines sets of concrete realizations for various kinds of artifacts. Then the intended structure of the resulting artifacts is specified as a composition of the small abstract building blocks. This abstract description then serves as the common source from which related artifacts can be derived automatically. The approach is generic in the kind of artifacts it can produce and is therefore adaptable to a wide range of contexts.