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What about English as a programming language? Few would question that this is a desirable goal. On the other hand, I dare say every one of us has rather deep reservations both about its feasibility and about a number of problems that it entails. This paper presents a point of view which gives some clarity to the relationship between English and programming languages. This point of view has found substance in an experimental system called DEACON. The second paper in this session will describe the specific DEACON system and its capabilities.

In discussing elastic shells one must be careful to state clearly the type of shell being discussed. Although a complete description together with restrictive assumptions will be given later, it is well to state at the outset that the type of shell discussed in this paper is the type to be found in aircraft fuselage construction. Such a shell has an elongated shape and consists of a thin skin supported by rings and longitudinal members. In analyzing such shells it is the universal practice to replace the elastic supporting rings by rigid bulkheads in order to simplify the analysis. This assumption will not be made in this paper.

One objective of the information processing community is to aid the problem-solving activities of its clients. In this paper we will discuss a methodology for serving the needs of the "user", that is, the end-user: the manager running an organization, the accountant understanding the financial condition of a company, the anthropologist studying a culture, the engineer designing some equipment, or the meteorologist predicting the weather. Each of these users has his own particular, idiosyncratic problems. The computer should be an effective tool for him in dealing with these problems. Our methodology is designed to provide each of these users with an appropriate interface to the computer, with a language which is natural to his view of reality. In this paper we examine the nature of today's ubiquitous applications packages, discuss our notion of applications languages and present some of our experience with the REL system, which has been designed to incorporate our views on specialized user languages.