Re: Shared game-data

Alfredo Novoa wrote:
>
> Indeed. The idea is that you formally describe what you want and an
> automatic programmer creates the code for you. The performance depends
> on how efficient the automatic programmer is.
>
> Some people think that automatic programmers are SciFi, but they are
> everywhere. We only need better ones.

I agree completely.

I only want to add one small point. As you say, the current state is that the programmer has only a single language with which to express both the logical semantics and the physical implementation of his program, in a conjoined way. The desired end state is that the programmer specifies his program's logical semantics and software provides a corresponding physical implementation. There is a state along the way that is worth mentioning.

It would be an improvement over the current state of affairs if the programmer had a language with which to express the logical semantics of his program, and a separate language with which to express implementation. Thus different implementations could by tried out, manually, and measured, without affecting the results of the program.

I don't know of anything that does this now, but the OOP world is slowly groveling its way in that direction. For example, it's starting to become a common idea in Java programming that one uses interface types at module boundaries, and only uses implementation types inside classes. For example, a method might be declared to return a java.util.List, and only the internals of the class know whether it's an ArrayList or a LinkedList. Quite primitive compared to what could be, but still a step in the right direction.

Marshall Received on Mon May 01 2006 - 05:15:46 CEST