---
title: "Program Understanding with the Lambda Calculus"
authors:
  - "Stanley Letovsky"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/101"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0101.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "512-513"
track: "Knowledge Representation"
keywords:
---

# Program Understanding with the Lambda Calculus

Stanley Letovsky

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 512-513.

## Abstract

A prerequisite of any attempt to build intelligent tools to assist in the programming process is a representation language for encoding programming knowledge. Languages that have been used for this purpose include the predicate calculus [5] and various program-schema languages [1,4]. This paper advocates a new candidate which is as expressive as the predicate calculus but more intimately connected with programming: the lambda calculus. Its advantages lie in its close resemblance to conventional programming languages, and in a straighforward model of inference by rewriting, which can be applied to automatic programming and program understanding. The use of the lambda calculus in an automatic program understander is described.