Natural language programming

Natural language programming is an ontology-assisted approach to writing software in terms of natural-language sentences, such as plain English, rather than a dedicated formal syntax. Instead of writing code and then separately building a natural-language interface or voice-control layer on top of it, natural language programming organizes the program itself around structured documents whose sections and sentences directly define the software's meaning and behavior, so the natural-language text is the program rather than a wrapper around one. Examples of the approach include Inform 7, used for authoring interactive fiction, the esoteric Shakespeare programming language styled after Shakespearean plays, and Wolfram Alpha's acceptance of natural-language queries as computational input; some program-synthesis techniques also draw on natural-language programming methods.