The Competence/Performance Dichotomy in Programming.

Abstract

The problem of automating some of the duties of programmers is considered. Our point of departure is the claim that data management has been automated to the point where the programmer concerned only about the correctness (as opposed to the efficiency) of his program need not involve himself in any aspect of the storage allocation problem. The problem of automating aspects of control is considered. To accomplish this a definition of control based on a fact/heuristic dichotomy is proposed. This allows one to operate arbitrarily on the control component of a program without affecting the program's correctness, which is entirely the responsibility of the fact component. The immediate objectives of this research are to learn how to program keeping fact and control separate, and to identify those aspects of control amenable to automation.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1977
Accession Number
ADA038245

Entities

People

  • Vaughan R. Pratt

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Automatic Programming
  • Computations
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Grammars
  • Identities
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Languages
  • Natural Languages
  • Programming Languages

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Theoretical Analysis.