Even in its very infancy computer technology has been seen as a collection of tools destined to solve problems of a given application domain (AD) 1. The problem solving process using computers is (and has been) carried out within the computer environment and requires the AD experts to formalize their problems in computer terms. The effort put forth so far toward making this process easier for AD experts has generated a rich and well-defined information technology (IT) domain, populated by computer artifacts such as programming languages and program generation tools. Successes of this approach to problem-solving led to the development of current computer technology whose complexity overwhelms computer experts themselves. Nevertheless, the usage of current IT for problem solving still requires AD experts to manipulate IT domain concepts and tools rather than AD concepts and tools. To further help this process, more and more complex IT tools are generated thus increasing software complexity to a level where only with formidable difficulties can AD experts manage to develop their application systems. Among the side effects of this situation are the lack of efficiency in application system development, poor performance in computer utilization, and even threat to the future evolution of computer technology itself. Our conjecture is that in order to break this vicious circle we need to rethink the problem solving process. We need to abandon the requirement that AD experts manipulate computer terms and to allow them to manipulate AD specific terms using AD specific languages. The recent advances created by computing research makes it feasible to move the problem solving process from the IT domain into the AD domain.

The language of universal algebras is used as an alternative approach for programming language specification. BNF (Backus-Naur form) rules are used for specifying the signature of the language algebras instead of the context-free syntax. The algorithm for program parsing is inductively defined by the following universal algebraic construction: any function defined on the generators of a free algebra taking values in the carrier of another similar algebra can be uniquely extended to a homomorphism between the two algebras; any conventional programming language can be specified by a finite set of BNF rules and its algebra of symbols is generated by a finite set of generator classes. Thus, any function defined on the finite set of generators offers an algebraic mechanism for a universal algorithm for source language program parsing. The right-hand side of the BNF rules are the patterns searched by the algorithm in the source text of the program. The essential feature of this algorithm is that it can be used as a driver for code generation and optimization in a translator.>