A Natural Language Programming System for Text Processing

A " basic English" to enable editors, writers, librarians, educators, and others to instruct computers to perform mechanical text processing conveniently has been defined (see Tables II to V for partial summary). It has been given the name SNAP (Stylized Natural Procedural) language for reference. A processor that executes procedures expressed in a subset of this language has worked for some months on several computers. It was used successfully last semester by 40 students with humanities background, in a graduate course in the School of Library Service of Columbia University, for elementary mechanized library and documentation tasks. The processor for the larger subset of the language shown in Tables II to V now works, and is being applied to several practical problems. The processor for the full language is being completed. A SNAP procedure consists of a succession of well-formed English sentences of a few simple types. Most of these begin with imperative verbs that are concerned with input and output operations, and with the manipulation of strings of characters, numbers, and arrays of strings and numbers. Conditional sentences begin with IF. Several constructions that extract and concatenate portions of strings and lists of strings are used in the objects of SNAP sentences. The SNAP processor is written (apart from specialized input-output routines) in FORTRAN IV. It deals directly with some 25 "built-in" verbs, and will allow the user to define further verbs by subroutines that are also written in SNAP.