Early experience with the Visual Programmer´s WorkBench

Author

Rubin, Robert V. ; Walker, James, II ; Golin, Eric J.

Author_Institution

GTE Lab., Waltham, MA, USA

Volume

16

Issue

10

fYear

1990

fDate

10/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1107

Lastpage

1121

Abstract

The Visual Programmer´s WorkBench (VPW) addresses the rapid synthesis and customization of environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. The goal of VPW is to enable the easy creation of environments for visual languages. The design of VPW and experience using it to generate a distributed programming environment for a concurrent visual language are described. A visual programming environment for the PetriFSA language generated with VPW is outlined. An overview is provided of the language definition model and its relation to the logical architecture of VPW. Details are given of the language specifications used in VPW, and its application in defining the PetriFSA language. A language-based environment for a specific visual language is generated in VPW from a specification of the syntactic structure, the abstract structure, the static semantics, and the dynamic semantics of the language. VPW is built around a model of distributed processing based on a shared distributed memory. This framework is used in defining the architecture of the environment and for the execution model of visual languages

Keywords

data structures; formal specification; program verification; programming environments; specification languages; visual programming; PetriFSA language; Visual Programmer´s WorkBench; abstract structure; customization of environments; distributed programming environment; dynamic semantics; specification; static semantics; syntactic structure; synthesis; visual languages; Application software; Distributed processing; Dynamic programming; Functional programming; Helium; Interactive systems; Programming environments; Software engineering; Synthesizers; Visual databases;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.60292

Filename

60292