Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a computer model for the acquistion of programming languages from textbooks. Starting from a verbal description of the notational conventions that are used to describe the syntactic form of programming commands, a meta grammar is generated that parses concrete command descriptions and builds up grammar rules for that commands. These rules are realized as definite clause grammar rules that captures the syntax of these commands. They can be used to parse and generate syntactically correct examples of a command. However, to solve real programming problems also the semantics of a command and of its parameters needs to be acquired. This is accomplished by the natural language parsing of the explanations given in the text and the augmentation of the definite clause command grammars with semantic structures.