Hello John, Thanks for the pointers, I will indeed have a look at this.
I have a pet project of mine trying to create a platform and prgramming model to handle this kind of problem. Such a simple thing as keeping referential integritey between static Java code, the embedded SQL and over to the dynamic databas is one of those irritating problems I intend to address with this approach. I enviosion a system with a meta-language and some standard transformation to editor views, compilation stages and type-systems, implemented in terms of this meta-language. BR, John On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:38 AM, John Zabroski <[email protected]> wrote: > John, > > It is true you can't know exact intention but that hasn't stopped > computer scientists from trying to answer the question. For example, > Joe Goguen's work on algebraic semiotics resulted in Joe developing a > few basic rules for mapping information from one medium to another. > Joe's first rule was "Wherever possible, preserve the structure of the > content." > > I could think of... and have thought of... a lot of techniques for > automatically porting code (an extremely difficult problem, > considering it covers correct live migration from an Intel to an > adversarial AMD processor with possibly deliberately incompatible > Instruction Set Architecture), including ways to automatically > trade-off structure with other goals in a controlled fashion. One > that Goguen was interested in was "content mixing" or "predictive > modeling" - hot buzzwords before the AI Winter came and dried up lots > of interesting funding. It is starting to re-emerge because of the > multi-core kerfluffle, since it can achieve the sorts of > "parallel-busyness" chipmaker's crave. I'd recommend Mark Turner's > paper Forging Connections, which suggests some meaning belong to the > mapping itself, rather the source-target approaches. In other words, > we tend to construct meaning in a blend between the source and target. > We don't just have mappings-as-meanings , but "forge" meaning *from* > mapping. (I hope I explained that well.) > > On 4/9/11, John Nilsson <[email protected]> wrote: >> I would think that it is generally impossible to automatically extract >> intentions from code. I run into this wall every day at work, I know >> _what_ the code is doing. But there is often little information as to >> _why_ it does what it does. It's not only due to the fact that the >> program is shaped by the idioms and constraints by the host language >> it is also the fact that the host language in general is a machine >> description language not a general problem statment language. >> >> I guess you are referring to the first problem when you talk about >> expressibility. >> >> To address the second problem I'm thinking that you have to seperate >> the problem description, and solution from machine specifications. >> That is have a programming model where you create languages >> specifically to encode the problem, and then create an intepreter for >> the language to create machines solving it. >> >> BR, >> John >> >> On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 6:19 AM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: >>> In some of the other correspondence, the loss of expressibility through >>> translation is mentioned. UNCOL also had this problem. I think quite a bit >>> of work by an expert system has to be added to something like OMeta in >>> order >>> to both retain expressibility, recover it, and generate it (when the >>> target >>> is more expressive than the source). >> >> _______________________________________________ >> fonc mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >> > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
