MAKING PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT

The paper deals with the question of how to write programs with having the relevant knowledge on programming available in explicit form. A knowledge base was built which codes some of the knowledge related to the problem of selecting a proper data type in the process of program formation. The base is presented in this paper along with several experiments which also show the system performance and user-system interaction. In the experiments, the user makes a guess which data type is appropriate to use and this hypothesis is either confirmed or rejected by the system. Moreover, as a result of the system's deductive reasoning other acceptable data types are proposed by the system. Two experiments are followed in the paper in more detail, including traces of the reasoning process and lists of established and rejected hypotheses. The result shows that the system is able to provide advice to a programmer. This can be particularly useful in the process of learning programming.