An Experiment in Knowledge-based Automatic Programming

David R. Barstow*,     Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

Human programmers seem to know a lot about programming. This suggests a way to try to build automatic programming systems: encode this knowledge in some machine-usable form. In order to test the viability of this approach, knowledge about elementary symbolic programming has been codified into a set of about four hundred detailed rules, and a system, called PECOS, has been built for applying these rules to the task of implementing abstract algorithms. The implementation techniques covered by the rules include the representation of mappings as tables, sets of pairs, property list markings, and inverted mappings, ...

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