Program understanding with the lambda calculus

Authors:
Stanley Letovsky
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Venue:
IJCAI'87 Proceedings of the 10th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Year:
1987

Citing 4
Cited 0

The T programming language: a dialect of LISP

The T programming language: a dialect of LISP
Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory

Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory
PROUST: Knowledge-based program understanding

ICSE '84 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Software engineering
A Method for Analyzing Loop Programs

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

A prerequisite of any attempt to build intelligent tools to assist in the programming process is a representation language for encoding programming knowledge. Languages that have been used for this purpose include the predicate calculus [5] and various program-schema languages [1,4]. This paper advocates a new candidate which is as expressive as the predicate calculus but more intimately connected w i th programming: the lambda calculus. Its advantages lie in its close resemblance to conventional programming languages, and in a straighforward model of inference by rewriting, which can be applied to automatic programming and program understanding. The use of the lambda calculus in an automatic program understander is described.