Re: Smart textual editors

Part of the Knowledge-Based Systems course I did last year was on
KB-Software-Engineering in particular editors called Cliche-Based-Editors.
We studied an extension to Emacs (kbemacs) which could do high level
manipulation of code and paste standard `cliches' into programs and expand
these using other cliches or user provided code to fill in gaps.
Constraints given in a logic based syntax allowed the program to suggest
what code to use and to help ensure the user's code is correct.


The system was quite powerful but extremely slow to use (I have never
actually tried to run it though). I also thought that this style of editor
was a bad idea and looked like it would encourage sloppy programming -- I'd
much rather have a language designed for provable code with a decent
development environment.


I think I have a paper called `Cliche Based Editing' somewhere, I'll post a
reference if I can find it.


Bruce J. McAdam
Computer Science Undergraduate
The University of Edinburgh
mailto:bjm@dcs.ed.ac.uk http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/bjm/
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