SHF: Small: A Mechanism for Extending A Programming Language with Interactive Syntax

软件开发人员将程序编写为线性文本。目前，这种编程方式是指导工业中的计算机的主要方式。虽然计算机不关心指令是以什么格式输入的，但这种格式对开发人员非常重要，他们必须在几个月后阅读程序才能理解和改进代码。问题是，大量的线性程序文本描述了程序问题域的不同部分之间的几何关系，比如一张地图或信息的表格排列。对于软件开发人员来说，任何努力都不能以文本方式表达这种关系，从而使它们易于破译。这个项目的目标是展示文本-可视化编程的形式将随着时间的推移极大地改善开发人员之间的沟通。该项目开发了一种机制，用于使用可视化和交互元素来补充文本编程语言：微型图形用户界面(Gui)。使用此机制，开发人员可以为特定问题域(例如，条件操作的二维表)创建迷你图形用户界面。其他开发人员将这些迷你图形用户界面的实例添加到他们的代码中，并与它们交互以输入特定的详细信息。当代码应该运行时，翻译器与这些可视元素协作，将它们呈现为普通指令。当代码被读取时，视觉特性比线性文本更直接地表达几何关系。项目团队将在数十个申请领域对该机制进行评估。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Software developers write programs as linear text. At the moment, this way of programming is the dominant way of instructing computers in industry. While the computer does not care in which format instructions are entered, the format greatly matters to the developer who must read a program many months later to understand and improve the code. The problem is that a good amount of this linear program text describes geometric relationships among different pieces of the program's problem domain, say a piece of a map or a tabular arrangement of information. No effort on the part of a software developer can ever express such relationships in a textual way that makes them easy to decipher. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that form of textual-visual programming will greatly improve the communication between developers across time.The project develops a mechanism for supplementing textual programming languages with visual and interactive elements: miniature graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Using this mechanism, developers can create mini GUIs for specific problem domains such as, for example, two-dimension tables of conditional actions. Other developers add instances of these mini-GUIs to their code and interact with them to enter specific details. When the code is supposed to be run, the translator collaborates with these visual elements to render them as ordinary instructions. When the code is to be read, the visual nature expresses the geometric relationships much more directly than linear text. The project team will evaluate the mechanism across several dozen application areas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.