PROW: a step toward automatic program writing

  • Authors:
  • Richard J. Waldinger;Richard C. T. Lee

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA;National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'69 Proceedings of the 1st international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 1969

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Abstract

This paper Describes a program, called "PROW", which writes programs PROW accepts the specification of the program in the language of predicate calculus, decides the algorithm for the program and then produces a LISP program which is an implementation of the algorithm. Since the construction of the algorithm is obtained by formal theorem-proving techniques, the programs that PROW writes are free from logical errors and do not have to be debugged The user of PROW can make PROW write programs in languages other than LISP by modifying the part of PROW that translates an algorithm to a LISP program. Thus PROW can be modified to write programs in any language In the end of this paper, it is shown that PROW can also be used as a question-answering program