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CHAPTER

15

Sloppy programming

Greg Little,¹ Robert C. Miller,¹ Victoria H. Chou,¹ Michael Bernstein,¹ Tessa Lau,² Allen Cypher²¹MIT CSAIL²IBM Research–Almaden

ABSTRACT

Modern applications provide interfaces for scripting, but many users do not know how to write script commands. However, many users are familiar with the idea of entering keywords into a Web search engine. Hence, if a user is familiar with the vocabulary of an application domain, we anticipate that they could write a set of keywords expressing a command in that domain. For instance, in the Web browsing domain, a user might enter “click search button”. We call loosely grammatical commands of this sort “sloppy commands.” We discuss several prototypes that implement sloppy programming, ...