Writing programs using ordinary language

In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that, for a few specific tasks, it's possible to write computer programs using ordinary language rather than special-purpose programming languages.The work may be of some help to programmers, and it could let nonprogrammers manipulate common types of files -- like word-processing documents and spreadsheets -- in ways that previously required familiarity with programming lang...