Software code generation from the (operational) semantics - reference request for automatic programming Are there research trends that try to research code generation directly from the (operational or some other kind of) semantics? One can imagine cognitive architecture that discovers and reasons about the tasks that the software should do and constructs the operational semantics of some program. And later there should be only one additional small system that generates software code from the semantics for the execution on well established platforms.

In such a way one can avoid the uncertain and rigorous path that goes through discovery and generation of formal specification that requires rigorous reasoning (sometimes undecidable, sometimes exponentially hard). Use of cognitive architecture and generation of the operational semantics (or some other semantics) allow one to do approximate, uncertain reasoning which cancels undecidability or exponentiality by discovery of additional axioms or shortcuts.

This is reference request question. Of course, I can use Google, but my experience is that computer science often names the research themes and terms differently than I have them imagined firstly and there is no reliable semantic search. So - reference request is necessary.
I haven't seen anything on this but the closest I could find is Evolving Algebras:


Evolving Algebras: An Attempt to Discover Semantics
Evolving Algebras: Mini-Course
Communicating Evolving Algebras


In that mini course there are several papers outlining different aspects and applications of the Evolving Algebra. From one of them:


  In 1988 Yuri Gurevich has discovered the notion of evolving algebra in an attempt
  to sharpen Turing's thesis by complexity theoretic considerations (see
  [22]). Through numerous case studies (see [4] for an annotated list which is
  complete up to 1994) it has become clear since then that using the notion of
  evolving algebras one can develop a powerful and elegant specication methodology
  which has a huge yet unexplored potential for industrial applications. In
  this report we are going to explain the basic concepts of this approach to the design
  and analysis of complex systems and illustrate its salient features through
  a challenging example from real life.


They also talk about successive refinement and hierarchical modeling.

Maybe if you could describe more on what you're trying to accomplish with the code generation part that would be helpful. It sounds like you are wondering about generating/forming a verified program from cognitive reasoning somehow, automatically generating the operational semantics. I haven't seen anything on that.