Automatic programming

In computer science, the term automatic programming refers to a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level.

Description

There has been little agreement on the precise definition of automatic programming, mostly because its meaning has changed over time.

David Parnas, tracing the history of "automatic programming" in published research, noted that in the 1940s it described automation of the manual process of punching paper tape.

Later it referred to translation of high-level programming languages like Fortran and ALGOL.

One of the earliest programs identifiable as a compiler was called Autocode.

Parnas concluded:

Automatic programming has always been a euphemism for programming in a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer.

See also

• Comparison of code generation tools
• Computer programming
• Data transformation
• Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM)
• Feature Oriented Programming
• Inductive programming
• Language-oriented programming (LOP)
• Metaprogramming
• Model Driven Engineering (MDE)
• Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
• Modeling language
• Program synthesis
• Program transformation
• Semantic translation
• Source-to-source compiler
• Vocabulary-based transformation

External links

• Automatic programming @ Wikipedia