CS.HARTMAN@UTEXAS-20.ARPA (11/01/83)
From: John Hartman <CS.HARTMAN@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
[Reprinted from the UTEXAS-20 bboard.]
GRADUATE BROWN BAG LUNCH - Friday 11/4/83, PAI 5.60 at noon:
I will talk about how programming knowledge contributes to
understanding programs and translating between high level languages.
The problems of translating between LISP and MIRROR (= HLAMBDA) will
be introduced. Then we'll look at the translation of A* (Best First
Search) and see some examples of how recognizing programming cliches
contributes to the result.
I'll try to keep it fairly short with the hope of getting critical
questions and discussion.
Old blurb:
I am investigating how a library of standard programming constructs
may be used to assist understanding and translating LISP programs.
A programmer reads a program differently than a compiler because she
has knowledge about computational concepts such as "fail/succeed loop"
and can recognize them by knowing standard implementations. This
recognition benefits program reasoning by creating useful abstractions and
connections between program syntax and the domain.
The value of cliche recognition is being tested for the problem of
high level translation. Rich and Temin's MIRROR language is designed
to give a very explicit, static expression of program information
useful for automatically answering questions about the program. I am
building an advisor for LISP to MIRROR translation which will exploit
recognition to extract implicit program information and guide
transformation.