A code assist function which suggests candidates responsive to a parsing of a partial program instruction statement is provided by parsing a program containing the partial program instruction statement to identify variables contained in the program; parsing the partial program instruction statement to generate proposals; and providing proposals to append to the partial program instruction statement to a user responsive to both the parsing of the program and the parsing of the partial program instruction statement. The code assist function may be performed according to a user-selected programming language dependent file selected from a plurality of programming language dependent files. Candidates may be proposed responsive to a verb of the partial program instruction statement, responsive to a variable type of a variable, or responsive to a portion of the program containing the partial program instruction statement.