The grammar of design: Applying grammatical techniques to telephone engineering

A new approach to the computer support of the design of telephone networks is described. By marrying techniques from computational grammar, object-oriented programming, and object-oriented databases, a simple and efficient way to help users search for potential designs and generate new ones has been developed. The approach treats the design problem as equivalent to finding legal sentences in a design grammar. Parsing techniques developed for relation grammars are used to parse legal designs. The system is simple, fast, robust, and tightly coupled with a commercial object-oriented database management system