JPH07141165A - Information processor - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To easily retrieve a large amt. of existing programs and to understand and utilize the contents of the programs by providing this information processor with a specification describing part expressing the specification of each program in natural language and a retrieving part for retrieving a program having an objective function while referring to the specification describing part. CONSTITUTION:The specification describing part 22 expresses the specification of each program in natural language. Namely, the specification expressed by the natural language is added to a program to be used by a third person thereafter. Thus the specification of each program can be displayed on a display or the like to be retrieved. Since the efficiency and acceleration of retrieval may not be satisfactorily attained only by the function of the specification describing part 22, an analyzed specification described part 23 is also prepared. Namely, morpheme analysis and syntax analysis are automatically executed by well-known natural language processing and keywords and proper data for retrieval are generated. Consequently an objective program can be extracted from a large amt. of programs and utilized for coding.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus that facilitates use and execution of a program already created when creating the program.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art Most programs used in information processing devices are written in assembler or high-level language. As the field of use of such information processing devices spreads and the development of more and more diverse software is required, it is preferable to use a program already created by a third party to facilitate the work of creating a new program. However, in order to understand and use programs created by others, it is necessary to understand the functions of the programs and the contents of various steps to be executed. For this, I refer to the specification written separately from the program. However, such specifications are not always created in an easy-to-understand manner for all programs.

There is also a method of writing various comments in the body of a program so that the program can be easily understood by a third party. FIG. 2 shows an explanatory diagram of a conventional program coding processing operation. For example, as shown on the left side of this figure, in a program having a program name 1, various comment statements 3 are described in the program body 2 as needed. Those who intend to use this program understand the program by referring to the comment sentence 3 and proceed with the coding process 4 of a new program while incorporating the whole or a part of such a program.

[0004]

However, the above conventional methods have the following problems to be solved. That is, even if various comment statements are described in the program text, the description method is left to the free will of the program creator, and if there is a programmer who writes a relatively large number of comment statements, a sufficient comment statement is sufficient. Some programmers do not fill in. Therefore, it is not easy to use the existing program widely and easily, and the productivity of the program is low. Further, among conventional programs, there are also programs using natural language that are easy for general people to understand. However,
It is not always easy to use due to the ambiguity of natural language interpretation and the redundancy of expressions, etc., and it has not been sufficiently spread.

The present invention has been made in view of the above points, and it is an object of the present invention to provide an information processing apparatus capable of easily searching a large amount of existing programs and understanding and using the contents thereof. It is intended.

[0006]

An information processing apparatus according to the present invention expresses a specification of each program in a natural language in association with a storage unit storing a plurality of programs for executing a predetermined process and each of the programs. The specification description section and a search section for searching for a program having a desired function by referring to the specification description section of each program are provided. It should be noted that it is advisable to provide a program call declarative section consisting of a short name for specifying and calling and executing each program in association with each program. In addition, an analyzed specification description part, which is obtained by parsing the specification description part into data in a searchable format, may be provided in association with each program.

[0007]

When a program is searched by this device, the specification description section described in natural language is referred to. The analyzed specification description part is a rewrite of the specification description part in order to facilitate the keyword search of the program.
In this way, the target program is searched out from a large number of programs and used for coding. Each program is called and executed in the same manner as a command by the short name written in the program call declaration section. Therefore,
Program coding work also becomes easier.

[0008]

The present invention will be described in detail below with reference to the embodiments shown in the drawings. FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of an information processing apparatus of the present invention. The device of the present invention is realized by such a block configuration, for example. In the figure, bus line 1
1 includes a program creation unit 12, a search unit 13, and an execution unit 1.
4 and the storage unit 15 are connected. The program creating unit 12 is composed of devices such as a keyboard and a display which are operated when the program coding process 16 is performed. When a search request 17 is made to search for a program to be used, the search unit 13 is a unit for executing and displaying a keyword search or a search by a classification symbol, for example. A keyboard or the like is used to input the search request, and a display or the like is used to display the results.

The execution section 14 calls a predetermined program call 1
When it receives 8, it comprises a processor for calling and executing the object program 26 from the program library of the storage unit 15. In addition to the mode of executing the object program 26, it is preferable that the operation in the mode of interpreting the source program is also possible. A program library is stored in the storage unit 15. Each program constituting this program library has a program call declaration section 21, a specification description section 2
2, analyzed specification description section 23, program declaration section 24,
Program description section 25 and object program 26
Is equipped with.

The program declaration section 24 and the program description section 25 are provided in a conventional source program. In the program declaration section 24, variables and other definitions used in the program are described, and the program description section 25 is described. The actual source program is described in. The object program 26 is such a source program converted into an executable format. The program call declaration unit 21, the specification description unit 22, and the analyzed specification description unit 23 are newly provided in the present invention. These are provided corresponding to each program.

FIG. 3 shows a program library explanatory diagram of the apparatus of the present invention. First, the program call declaration section 21
Is composed of a short name that identifies each program, such as the number "99", as shown on the right side of this figure. In the present invention, by using this short name in the same manner as the command, the program included in the program library can be freely used and executed. It should be noted that each program executes a certain process, but in this case, there are data, output data, and the like to be given in advance for program execution. This is called an argument, but when the program is executed, the necessary arguments are set in addition to the above-mentioned short name of the program, and the program is executed.

The specification description section 22 expresses the specifications of each program in natural language. That is, in the present invention, the specification expressed in the natural language is added to the program that may be used by a third party later. For example, in this example, "the seat between the station ($ 1) of the train number ($ 2) and the station ($ 3) is ($
4) Reserve a seat. The contents are such as ".
The argument in this case is four pieces of data from ($ 1) to ($ 4). Therefore, when the program is called by the short name "99" and these arguments are given, the seat reservation is executed by this program.

The specifications of such a program can be displayed on a display or the like and retrieved by the information processing apparatus as shown in FIG. However, in order to search for a program having a desired function from a large number of programs, it is preferable to search by keywords or classification. In such a case, the efficiency and speed of the search may not be sufficient if only the specification description section 22 created by the program creator in natural language is insufficient. Therefore, the analyzed specification description section 23 is provided. That is, this analyzed specification description part 23
Is a morpheme analysis and syntactic analysis that is automatically performed by well-known natural language processing to generate keywords and other appropriate data for retrieval. For example, in this example, various data for displaying the contents of the train seat reservation program are held. For example, if the dependency relationship of keywords is displayed as shown in the figure, not only the keywords but also the meaning of the sentence can be interpreted. The search unit 13 shown in FIG. 1 may be configured to enable a manual search by simply displaying the specification description unit in order on the display, or to automatically search the keywords prepared in the analyzed specification description unit 23. It may be composed of a search processing program for searching.

The information processing apparatus of the present invention having the above configuration is actually used as follows. First, the programmer plans the structure of the program he is trying to create and searches for a program that can be used in the past. This is executed by the search unit 13 in response to the search request 17 shown in FIG. Here, for example, in the case of train seat reservation, a program search is performed using keywords such as "train", "reservation", and "seat". By this, when some programs are extracted, the programmer reads the specification description section 22 and understands the contents of the programs. After that, program coding process 1
An ordinary program is described in the program creating section 12 by 6, and the processing using the short name and the argument of the program is incorporated in the manner described above. After that, when the created program is added to the program library and the program is executed, the execution unit 14 executes the program by the program call 18.

FIG. 4 shows an explanatory diagram of a program example according to the present invention. When a program is created according to the present invention, the structure is as shown in this figure. That is, the program text 30 describes, for example, a process of reading the data XXX and a process of executing the program “77” with XXX and YYY as arguments, in order from the top. Next, there is a process of storing YYY obtained by executing the program “77” in the memory, and further a process of executing the program “88” with YYY as an argument. When performing such program coding, the short name of the program such as "77" or "8" is used.
In order to make it clear that it is the short name of the program, the number such as “8” is prefixed with a symbol such as %%. The program call read by the short name and argument in the program text is automatically linked with the program library and executed.

It should be noted that each of the declarative part, the descriptive part, etc. of the program library as described above represents a logical structure, and may be managed by being connected to each other by a pointer. In FIG. 1, when a new program is created, the program creation unit 12 compiles the program to create an object program, executes natural language processing on the natural language of the specification description unit 22, and outputs a sentence. The morpheme information and the syntax tree are created to generate the analyzed specification description unit 23. The new program created in this way is included in the program library and can be used by a third party. Note that it is also possible to search for a program by a method in which the programmer possesses the printed contents of the program call declaration section 21 and the specification description section 22, which are summarized.

The present invention is not limited to the above embodiments. The program call declarative section 21 uses numerical values or the like to simplify the description, but symbols such as alphabets may be used. Further, in order to facilitate the use by a third party, the specification description section may include not only a description in natural language but also a chart or the like. In addition to the above, the program library may store a program composed of only a program declarative section, a program description section, and an object program as in the conventional case. It suffices to add the program call declarative part as in the present invention only to a program that a third party may retrieve and use later.

[0018]

The information processing apparatus of the present invention described above is
For each program that the programmer wants to use, a specification description section that explains the contents in an easy-to-understand manner is provided and can be searched, making it easy to intuitively understand the main functions of existing programs and easy to use. become. Also,
By performing morphological analysis and syntactic analysis of the specification description section and providing an analyzed specification description section, it becomes possible to automatically and quickly search for a program having a target function from a large number of programs.

Furthermore, by storing each program with a short name in the program call declaration section, each program can be easily called during program coding, and a routine routine that is frequently used can be stored. It can be handled as easily as commands. Therefore, even if the detailed contents of each program are not known, it is possible to easily use these programs and create and execute a new complicated program.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of an information processing apparatus of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is an explanatory diagram of a conventional program coding work.

FIG. 3 is an explanatory diagram of a program library of the device of the present invention.

FIG. 4 is an explanatory diagram of a program example according to the present invention.

[Explanation of symbols]

 12 Program Creation Section 13 Search Section 14 Execution Section 15 Storage Section 21 Program Call Declaration Section 22 Specification Description Section 23 Analyzed Specification Description Section

Claims (3)

[Claims] 1. A storage unit storing a plurality of programs for executing a predetermined process, a specification description unit expressing the specifications of each program in a natural language corresponding to each program, and a specification description unit of each program. And an information processing device for searching for a program having a desired function. 2. The information processing apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising a program call declaring section having a short name for identifying and calling each program and executing the program so as to correspond to each program. 3. The information processing apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising: an analyzed specification description section, which is obtained by parsing the specification description section into data in a searchable format, corresponding to each program. .