English as a very high level language for simulation programming

Abstract

An automatic programming system whlch produces simulation programs from information obtained through natural language dialogue has been implemented under CP/CMS on the IBM 360/67. In the current version the information obtained from an English conversation about a simple queuing problem is used to build a language-independent entlty-attrlbute-value data structure. From this structure both an English description of the problem and a GPSS simulation program for it can be produced. This processing is done by a FORTRAN program which interprets sets of decoding and encoding rules written in a specially developed grammar-rule language. The paper includes a complete sample problem with a discussion of its processing and examples of decoding and encoding rules.