Volume 15 of Advances in Computers treats a number of important and significant areas in computer science of particular current interest. I am
pleased that we have been able to obtain contributions for this volume
from highly regarded authors with established reputations in their fields.
The current volume of these advances, I believe, accurately reflects the
present growth of computer science and its applications.
In his article on automatic programming, Alan Biermann of Duke
University treats an important current topic which should have
considerable practical application. He indicates that automatic programming is the
natural evolution of what began as hand coding in machine language and
which led to assembly language programming and then to the development
of high level languages. He covers many of the various approaches to
automatic programming, some of which he indicates seem to have much
promise for the future. He points out that this field, however, is still in
its very early stages of development. Biermann suggests that research in
automatic programming involves the relationship between human
languages and machine languages and the process of translating between the
two. He states that the main task in automatic programming is the
discovery of the nature of these languages and the implementation required
to perform the translation between them.