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Date:	Fri, 8 Aug 2003 10:32:51 PDT7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: English as programming language (was: Warpstock 2003 Presentation)

Content Type: text/plain

Tom Novelli wrote:
>
> > But English would work.
>
> It works for describing algorithms to humans.. math,
> flowcharts and diagrams help.. but it takes Real(tm)
> 100% Natural Intelligence to understand English. . . .
> So you have to impose some serious restrictions on
> English, and you end up with COBOL or Pascal or BASIC,
> which definitely leave something to be desired!

A quick tangent -- I found Pascal to be a reasonably robust language.
There are several versions of Pascal available for OS/2, most of them
free. One is a clone of Borland Pascal. The major Borland Pascal
problem for me was a maximum string length of 255 characters (the
strings had an associated length byte rather than being null
terminated); the OS/2 clone allows long strings.

Now back to English.

I want to clarify something. When I say English can be a programming
language, I mean it in the same way that English may be used in the
medical profession or in the field of law. Certainly no one is
expecting a compiler to create a program which will solve the world's
nutritional problems if it is told to compile the following:

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog,
Rockin' all the time,
You ain't nothin' but a hound dog,
Rockin' all the time,
Yeah, you ain't never caught a rabbit,
You ain't no friend of mine.

In short, not every English phrase is a program. I can write
non-programs in COBOL, PL/I and assembler too.

Take any English sentence that is part of a program. Parse the sentence
(a non-trivial task). Call the necessary subroutines.

Sounds like COBOL, yes? But a COBOL sentence takes a rigid syntactical
form; I think that we've learned enough in the past 40 years to allow a
more general free-flowing syntax.

All I'm suggesting is one addition -- create a parser that understands a
"reasonable" English sentence. There is existing research in this field
but what I've read basically uses just brute force methods. I haven't
checked for any patents. Near as I can figure, you first create a logic
tree of the words and then analyze the content.

The output need not be an executable. Rather, the program could create
source code in an existing computer language -- perhaps RPG, perhaps
SQL, perhaps Rexx, perhaps PL/I, whatever. The program could, based on
the English it analyzed, make a determination as to which computer
language it would use.

So you might want to call this the English Preprocessor.

And I think it belongs in the new HLL we're discussing.

- Peter

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