Abstract

The machine production of programs for testing certain aspects of programming products has been achieved. The system has been successfully used on a number of products to establish their reliability in accepting new test cases without error. The input to the system is a syntax definition in a formal notation. The construction of such a definition for a high-level language is an exacting task. It yields important bonuses by deepening knowledge of the structure of the language and showing up obscurities or ambiguities in the existing documentation, Definitions exist for ECMA Algol, FORTRAN IV, and a major subset of PL/I. The future effort required to adapt the definitions to particular versions of these languages should be small.