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The need to integrate several versions of a program into a common one arises frequently, but it is a tedious and time consuming task to integrate programs by hand. To date, the only available tools for assisting with program integration are variants of text-based differential file comparators; these are of limited utility because one has no guarantees about how the program that is the product of an integration behaves compared to the programs that were integrated.

This paper concerns the design of a semantics-based tool for automatically integrating program versions. The main contribution of the paper is an algorithm that takes as input three programs A, B, and Base, where A and B are two variants of Base. Whenever the changes made to Base to create A and B do not “interfere” (in a sense defined in the paper), the algorithm produces a program M that integrates A and B. The algorithm is predicated on the …