Harmonia

Shorthand

(John J. Jordan)

Shorthand is an enhancement for interactively creating and modifying code. Its purpose is to allow the programmer to work on code with significantly fewer keystrokes than a conventional code editor. Common small structural operations can be performed on fragments of code with as few as one or two keystrokes. Alternatively, shorthand can be enabled for voice input. The resulting technology is useful both for expert programmers and for those with disabilities that make extensive typing difficult. The key idea behind this work is to use a combination of language awareness and contextual analysis to interpret the commands. The interface can then be made intuitive and natural. For example, inside a Java class, the input “p s v main ( s [ argv” would be taken to designate “public static void main ( String [] argv ) {}”. Every letter or word entered is context-sensitive, and every letter or word entered further refines the context. Shorthand has been prototyped for both Java and Spoken Java within the Harmonia framework.

For more information, please contact JJ.