A detailed survey was developed and administered with the purpose of gathering the
feedback from the programming community regarding alternative
options for the proposed vocabulary and grammar. The questions selected for the
survey represent an assortment of programming commands that
fall under each of the programming control flow structures: Sequential Structures; Decision or Conditional Structures, and
Looping or Repetitive Structures. The participants were students of Computer Science and Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
After performing a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results obtained from the survey, which contains 10 questions (each one is a multiple choice featuring two or more possible verbalizations of the code and one write-in answer slot for alternative suggestions), a final version of the grammar and
vocabulary was proposed, and is presented in Table 1. It is expected to be embraced by the programming community.
The proposed voice command is written in bold, arial, and red, the
corresponding C++ code, as a consequence of the voice
command, in italics, bold, and black (this is the output produced
by the voice-recognition software in an editor), and variables and
literals presented in italics, and green.
Table 1: Final Proposed Vocabulary and Grammar
Programming structure
|
Voice commands
|
Variable definition
|
defining
integer variable
int ;
total
int total;
|
Standard output: literals
|
printing literal
cout << “ ”;
hello world
cout
<< “ hello world”;
|
Standard output: variables
|
printing
variable
cout << ;
total
cout << total;
|
Mathematical operations
|
printing
cout << ;
grouping
cout << () ;
total
adding 2
cout << ( total + 2 ) ;
moving
right, symbol frontslash 4
cout << ( total + 2 ) / 4 ;
|
Standard input
|
getting
input into variable total
cin >> total;
|
Modulus operations
|
total
modulus 3
total % 3
|
Relational operations
|
total
symbol greater than seven
total >
7
|
Logical operations
|
(statementA)
operating and
(statement) &&
negating
(statementB)
(statement) && !(statement)
|
Loops
|
inserting
for loop
for ( ; ; )
{
}
inserting
initiation (initializeExpression)
inserting
condition (conditionalExpression
inserting
modification (modifyExpression)
for ( initializeExpression; conditionalExpression;
modificationExpression)
{
}
entering
loop (statement(s))
for ( initializeExpression; conditionalExpression;
modificationExpression)
{
statement(s);
}
|
Conditionals
|
inserting
conditional
if()
{
}
inserting
condition total symbol greater than seven
if( total > 7)
{
}
printing
literal eight
if( total > 7)
{
cout << “8”;
}
else
printing literal six
if( total > 7)
{
cout << “8”;
}else
{
cout << “6”;
}
|
