Natural Language Programming

The first thing that many people think of when discussing Natural Language Programming is the very scientific concept of talking to a computer in a natural language and having the code generated automatically. These concepts are important for search engines and artificial intelligence (AI).

However, Natural Language Programming can also help us in writing code that is easier to read, understand, maintain, and even debug. Although it sounds very modern, a lot of traditional programming languages, such as Cobol and SQL use Natural Language to make the code easier to read. Take the following example:

select [No_], [Name] from [Contact]
where [Name] like '%Mark%'

The C/AL programming language that we use in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is based on Pascal, and is traditionally not considered readable as a natural language. If we want to apply readability to C/AL, we have to implement a concept that we will refer to as multilevel code.

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This video explains...