A really interesting tool that turns English sentences into code has been developed. Technology Research News has the story. ‘…Metafor organizes a natural-language description of a program into the skeleton of a program by mapping the inherent structure of English — parts of speech, syntax, and subject-verb-object roles — into a basic programmatic structure of class objects, properties, functions, and if-then rules, said Liu.

While the logic of the researchers’ interpreter tackles only about 20 percent of the problem of full natural language programming, it achieves about 80 percent of the perceived rewards, said Liu. “These code structures are a pragmatic implication of English syntax and semantics, but even these basic structures begin to resemble a nice program,” he said…’ Given the size, complexity and changeable nature of electronic medical record, billing and patient interface software, a tool like this could really help. This link is courtesy of Slashdot.