Design and implementation of programming environments in the Visual Programmers Workbench

The authors describe Visual Programmers Workbench (VPW), which addresses the rapid synthesis of programming environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. 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 shared distributed memory. This framework is used both for defining the architecture of the environment and for the execution model of programming languages. The VPW has been used to experiment with visual programming environments for several visual languages. The design of the Visual Programmers Workbench and experience with using it to generate a distributed programming environment for a concurrent visual language are described