Interactive Programming Environments Research Articles (Page 1)

This paper explores both the design and classroom usage of a visual and interactive programming environment. This environment, named JavaTown, provides a visual representation of the inner workings of object-oriented programs, in which on-screen characters are literally depicted as carrying messages to each other and remembering values. JavaTown was created to aid in the introduction of some of the most elusive concepts in the CS1/CS2 curriculum: object references, parameter passing, variable scope, recursion, and linked lists.

A critical analysis and evaluation of Web-based environments for program development

Vu is an interactive visual programming environment, which enables interface designers to create highly interactive, graphical, direct-manipulation-style graphical user interfaces in a very natural manner. The general strategy of vu is to enable the designer to draw the screen display that the end user will see, and to test the interface by performing actions just as the end user would. This is achieved by providing exploratory programming in a highly visual and object-oriented environment. This paper describes the design principles and structure of vu.

We have developed and implemented techniques that double the performance of dynamically-typed object-oriented languages. Our SELF implementation runs twice as fast as the fastest Smalltalk implementation, despite SELF's lack of classes and explicit variables. To compensate for the absence of classes, our system uses implementation-level maps to transparently group objects cloned from the same prototype, providing data type information and eliminating the apparent space overhead for prototype-based systems. To compensate for dynamic typing, user-defined control structures, and the lack of explicit variables, our system dynamically compiles multiple versions of a source method, each customized according to its receiver's map. Within each version the type of the receiver is fixed, and thus the compiler can statically bind and inline all messages sent to self. Message splitting and type prediction extract and preserve even more static type information, allowing the compiler to inline many other messages. Inlining dramatically improves performance and eliminates the need to hard-wire low-level methods such as +,==, and ifTrue:. Despite inlining and other optimizations, our system still supports interactive programming environments. The system traverses internal dependency lists to invalidate all compiled methods affected by a programming change. The debugger reconstructs inlined stack frames from compiler-generated debugging information, making inlining invisible to the SELF programmer.

The PROSPEC software environment for designing and verifying communication protocols is described. It integrates several tools that implement methods for protocol verification and construction (i.e., fair reachability analysis, multiphase construction, and protocol projection). The system provides a unified graphical interface to facilitate the application of these methods and creates an interactive environment for specifying, verifying, and designing communication protocols. PROSPEC was used successfully to design and verify versions of BSC, X.21, X.25, and Telnet document transfer protocols. >

Abstract Studies have been made on computer systems based on the user model reflecting the behavior of the users, aiming at the human interface which is easy to use. Recently, it has been proposed that individual models be constructed for the users, rather than a model where the only one “typical” human model represents the user in general. A case has not been observed, however, where the individual model is utilized fully in the interactive computer system which actually requires such an approach. From such a viewpoint, this paper proposes a generation of suitable messages utilizing the individual user model, by restricting the problem to the generation of the messages from the computer side in the construction of a program in the interactive programming environment. The features of the user model which will be useful in such a problem, are pointed out. The points in this study are that the skill of the user concerning the system is separated into the general understanding level and the knowledge of the individual functions; utilization of the information obtained by the operating system and for the language processor; and object‐oriented user model whose contents are always updated. A human interface was implemented experimentally which indicates the individual user, the error message from Lisp interpreter according to each situation. We have conducted an experiment by using the interface. The usefulness of our method was demonstrated by the result of experiment.

Interactive programming environments

Interactive programming environments , Interactive programming environments , مرکز فناوری اطلاعات و اطلاع رسانی کشاورزی

Programming environments support the creation, modification, execution and debugging of programs. The goal of integrating a programming environment is more than simply building tools that share a common data base and provide a consistent user interface. Ideally, the programming environment appears to the programmer as a single tool; there are no firewalls separating the various functions provided by the environment. This paper describes the techniques used to integrate Magpie, an interactive programming environment for Pascal. Display windows, called browsers, provide a consistent approach for interacting with the Pascal source code or the execution state of the program. Incremental compilation allows the programmer to specify debugging actions in Pascal, eliminating the need for a separate debugging language.