Review from Ed McCormick

• Step-wise refinement is a method for developing software incrementally by adding features to a simple program. Prior to this work, only ad-hoc methods were available to apply this technique to multiple programs and non-code representations written in different dsals (such as design rules or make files).

• The AHEAD model: a principled technique for scaling refinement-based generators. AHEAD expresses an arbitrary number of programs and representations as nested sets of equations.

• Quantitative results of an experiment using AHEAD tools to build non-trivial systems (FSATS and AHEAD tools).

• Qualitative results on the experiment using AHEAD to construct large systems would have been useful - especially on the debugging/maintentence phases.

• The principle of uniformity says to treat all non-code artifacts as classes and refine them analogously. (basically - define inheritance relationships between non-code artifacts when need be). That this is possible does not seem believable by the end of the paper.

• How do refinement functions look for DSALS like javadoc comments or word docs?