abstract = "Program synthesis can be posed as a satisfiability
problem and approached with generic SAT solvers. Only
short programs can be however synthesized in this way.
Program sketching by Solar-Lezama assumes that a human
provides a partial program (sketch), and that synthesis
takes place only within the uncompleted parts of that
program. This allows synthesizing programs that are
overall longer, while maintaining manageable
computational effort. In this paper, we propose
Evolutionary Program Sketching (EPS), in which the role
of sketch provider is handed over to genetic
programming (GP). A GP algorithm evolves a population
of partial programs, which are being completed by a
solver while evaluated. We consider several variants of
EPS, which vary in program terminals used for
completion (constants, variables, or both) and in the
way the completion outcomes are propagated to future
generations. When applied to a range of benchmarks, EPS
outperforms the conventional GP, also when the latter
is given similar time budget.",