Overview of a Linguistic Theory of Design

Abstract

SPADE is a theory of the design of computer programs in terms of complementary planning and debugging processes. An overview of the authors' recent research on this theory is provided. SPADE borrows tools from computational linguistics ??ammars, augmented transition networks (ATN's), chart-based parsers ?? formalize planning and debugging. The theory has been applied to parsing protocols of programming episodes, constructing a grammar-based editor in which programs are written in a structured fashion, and designing an automatic programming system based ont eh ATN formalism.