KNOWLEDGE-BASED PROGRAMMING - AN EXPERIMENT IN SELECTING A DATA TYPE

The paper gives a short overview of the area of knowledge based progra mming. Research direction toward an intelligent support to software de velopment is identified as an important aim. The paper concentrates on an original work in the area of knowledge based programming. The work reported in the paper relates to a tool to assist trainee programmers . A knowledge base on programming was built for a special area of prog ramming expertise related to selecting a data type in the process of p rogram formation. Properties of the knowledge base are discussed and i ts representation is devised. Description of one experiment is given i n detail, showing user-system interaction. In the experiment, which re lates to processing of data under a specific strategy, the user descri bes the relevant properties of the problem (such as whether the data e lements will be processed more than once, whether their number can be determined in advance) and the system tries to infer what data type(s) would be appropriate to represent data with such properties. This can be regarded as an adviser to the user. The results show that the syst em is able to offer qualified advice. This is also an important consid eration in the process of learning programming.