Editing DWIM (section)

===InterLisp===

Teitelman's DWIM package "correct[ed] errors automatically or with minor user intervention",<ref name='teitelman' /> similarly to [[autocorrection]] for natural language.

Teitelman and his [[Xerox PARC]] colleague [[Larry Masinter]] later described the philosophy of DWIM in the [[Interlisp]] [[programming environment]] (the successor of BBN Lisp): 
<blockquote>
Although most users think of DWIM as a single identifiable package, it embodies a pervasive philosophy of user interface design: at the user interface level, system facilities should make reasonable interpretations when
given unrecognized input. ...the style of interface used throughout Interlisp allows the user to omit various parameters and have these default to reasonable values...<br>

DWIM is an embodiment of the idea that the user is interacting with an agent who attempts to interpret the
user's request from contextual information. Since we want the user to feel that he is conversing with the system,
he should not be stopped and forced to correct himself or give additional information in situations where the correction or information is obvious.<ref>Warren Teitelman, Larry Masinter, "The Interlisp Programming Environment", ''Computer'' (IEEE) '''14''':4:25-33, April 1981. {{doi|10.1109/C-M.1981.220410}} [http://larry.masinter.net/interlisp-ieee.pdf pdf]</ref>
</blockquote>

Critics of DWIM claimed that it was "tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone, and no others" and called it "Do What Teitelman Means" or "Do What Interlisp Means",<ref>Guy L. Steele Jr., Richard P. Gabriel, "The Evolution of Lisp", in ''History of programming languages---II'', 1996, {{ISBN|0-201-89502-1}} {{doi|10.1145/234286.1057818}}, p. 16. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf pdf]</ref> or even claimed DWIM stood for "Damn Warren's Infernal Machine."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html |title = DWIM}}</ref>