Natural languages like English are rich, complex, and powerful. The highly creative and graceful use of languages like English and Tamil, by masters like Shakespeare and Avvaiyar, can certainly delight and inspire. But in practice, given cognitive constraints and the exigencies of daily life, most human utterances are far simpler and much more repetitive and predictable. In fact, these utterances can be very usefully modeled using modern statistical methods. This fact has led to the phenomenal success of statistical approaches to speech recognition, natural language translation, question-answering, and text mining and comprehension.We begin with the conjecture that most software is also natural, in the sense that it is created by humans at work, with all the attendant constraints and limitations-and thus, like natural language, it is also likely to be repetitive and predictable. We then proceed to ask whether a) code can be usefully modeled by statistical language models and b) such models can be leveraged to support software engineers. Using the widely adopted n-gram model, we provide empirical evidence supportive of a positive answer to both these questions. We show that code is also very repetitive, and in fact even more so than natural languages. As an example use of the model, we have developed a simple code completion engine for Java that, despite its simplicity, already improves Eclipse's built-in completion capability. We conclude the paper by laying out a vision for future research in this area.
The Frewens sandstone is composed of two elongate tide‐influenced sandstone bodies that are positioned directly above and slightly landward of a more wave‐influenced lobate sandstone. The 20‐km‐long, 3‐km‐wide Frewens sandstone bodies coarsen upwards and fine away from their axes, have gradational bases and margins and have eroded tops abruptly overlain by marine shales. These sandstones are superbly exposed in large cliffs on the banks of the South Fork of the Powder River in central Wyoming, USA. The deposits change upwards from thinly interbedded sandstones and mudstones to metre‐thick heterolithic cross‐strata and, finally, to metres‐thick sandstone‐dominated cross‐strata. There is abundant evidence for tidal modulation of depositional flows; however, palaeocurrents were strongly ebb‐dominated and nearly parallel the trend of sandstone‐body elongation. Detailed mapping of stratal geometry and facies across these exposures shows a complex internal architecture. Large‐scale bedding units within sandstone bodies are defined by alternations in facies, bed thickness and the abundance of shales. Such bedsets are inclined (5°–15°) in walls oriented parallel to palaeoflow and gradually decrease in dip over hundreds of metres as they extend from the sandstone‐dominated deposits higher in a sandstone body to muddier deposits lower in the body. Where viewed perpendicular to palaeoflow, bedsets are 100‐metre‐wide lenses that shingle off the sandstone‐body axis towards its margins. The sandstone bodies are interpreted as sand ridge deposits formed on the shoreface of a tide‐influenced river delta. Metres‐thick cross‐strata in the upper parts of sandstone bodies resemble deposits of bars (sandwaves) formed where tidal currents moved across shallows and the tops of tidal ridges. Heterolithic deposits lower in sandstone bodies record fluctuating currents caused by ebb and flood tides and varying river discharge. Erosion surfaces capping sandstone bodies record tidal ravinement. The tidal ridges were abandoned following transgression and covered with marine mud as waters deepened.
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