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From: "Marshall  Spight" <marshall.spight@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.databases.theory
Subject: Re: Shared game-data
Date: 30 Apr 2006 20:15:46 -0700
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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