So to summarise this whole discussion, based on text of your previous message, it seems that you would like to know what aspect of computer programming is, or ever could be "automatic, without requiring conscious thought ... or rational processes"
Is that right? I personally find this an interesting question, and perhaps some of the research in my group has a direct bearing on it. But I'd have to warn you that it's a very long way from anything that is recognisable as conventional computer science or software engineering research, and you would be unlikely to receive a lot of respect for pursuing that question in a systematic or rigorous way. (By the way, to summarise the couple of dozen experimental investigations of declarative versus imperative programming paradigms, which I don't think anyone has done in this discussion yet despite the fact that it is almost always the agenda that people are pursuing when they raise this question: The result found more often than any other is that the need to use recursion as a control strategy is the greatest single obstacle to the practical use of most popular declarative languages. Recursion seems to be considered 'intuitive' by a tiny number of people, most of whom become professional computer scientists, mathematicians or philosophers. Recursion is a major stumbling block to everyone else. As far as I know, in every study comparing declarative and imperative languages, this finding dominates all others. Some people have gone on from the naive initial question, to do nice work on helping people understand recursion. As far as I remember, Shaaron Ainsworth and Judith Good both made some progress on that in their respective PhDs. Alan -- Alan Blackwell Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge Further details from www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/
