Incidentally, of course, code generation doesn't necessarily need AI to work.
Some years ago I was working with/on telephone exchange design, and telephone system's are defined in no small part using formalised structured language, notably UML and SDL. The UML was a tool largely to help formalise the SDL, and we had an SDL compiler. I can't now remember whether it went to a byte-code type output or to C/C++ ready for compiling with a conventional compiler. The same kind of thing is also quite commonly used in DSP and similar environments (and my central heating controller, actually), where functional block are dragged and dropped, configured and interconnected, with little if any code actually written by the implementer. My worry with a lot of the school-oriented stuff is the focus on teaching "coding". I think "coding" should probably already substantially be the past. In some respects I'm disappointed that we're still doing so much, at least in the computer systems end of things (most of my work is embedded, where small footprints very close to the metal hold things up some). Then again, it also seems to me that we've not really progressed very far with tools. Lisp(58!), Prolog(72), Smalltalk(80), perl(87), tcl(88), Python(89+), Java(91), Ruby(99). Actually that's a bit depressing. Gordon. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
