Pattern-Directed Programming System for Lisp

Lisp has flexible data structures and can manipulate programs as data. Thus, Lisp is used often as descriptive language of systems which assist the development of Lisp programs. We have developed a system which transforms input/output specification described as a sequence of pattern pairs into a Lisp program. In this paper, we describe pattern definition and transformation rules which convert description by pattern into the Lisp program. We also describe some examples of description by pattern and transform their results. As its application, we describe an example of description by pattern of a pure Lisp compiler.