LANDSCAPES: Visions of Programming Environments

该项目涉及在一个集成和开放的框架中开发实用的编程工具。支持现代编程的工具必须处理大型系统、多个程序员、多种语言、现有代码和新代码的混合，以及多个进程和线程。这项工作使用控制集成和基于片段的数据集成的简单形式，在一个开放的、可扩展的和强大的设置中结合了各种工具。片段是程序工件的语义上重要的部分：源文件中的定义或作用域，文档文件的部分，配置描述中的规则，等等。集成方法识别这样的片段，并在一个简单而小的中央数据库中保存对它们的引用。使用数据库查询（本质上是usedef链和少量特定于工具的信息）识别片段所必需的数据对该信息进行了扩充。除了片段和控制集成之外，该环境还提供了用于定义和管理组成项目的文件和上下文的通用工具，以及用于所有软件工件的通用编辑器。项目经理充当管理版本控制、配置管理和多个程序员的前端。通用编辑器提供高质量的排版以及对超文本链接和图形的支持。在这个环境框架之上，这个项目研究了各种编程工具的开发和使用。该研究使用在以前的NSF资助下开发的3D可视化软件包扩展了可视化工具。单个前端将允许程序员指定应该可视化哪些信息（来自各种来源）以及如何为每个特定的应用程序呈现这些信息。实验测量可视化对理解复杂系统的静态结构和动态行为的有效性。第三套工具包括编辑。该项目将扩展现有的编辑器，以允许程序员将系统视为一个具有连接各种软件构件的动态和静态链接的单一电子文档。这些链接可以通过内置查询（例如转到名称的定义）、用户定义查询或静态链接来定义。

This project involves the development of practical programming tools in an integrated and open framework. Tools that support modern programming must deal with large systems, multiple programmers, multiple languages, a mixture of existing and new code, and multiple processes and threads. The work combines a variety of tools in an open, extensible, and powerful setting using control integration and a simple form of data integration based on fragments. Fragments are semantically significant portions of a program artifact: definitions or scopes in a source file, sections of documentation file, rules in a configuration description, etc. The approach to integration identifies such fragments and keeps references to them in a simple and small central database. This information is augmented with the data necessary to identify fragments using database queries, essentially usedef chains and small amounts of tool-specific information. In addition to fragment and control integration, the environment provids common facilities for defining and managing the files and contexts that make up a project, and a common editor for all software artifacts. The project manager serves as a front end for managing version control, configuration management, and multiple programmers. The common editor provides high quality typography along with support for hypertext links and graphics. On top of this environmental framework, this project investigates the development and utility of a variety of programming tools. The research extends visualization tools using a 3D visualization package developed under a previous NSF grant. A single front end would allow the programmer to specify both what information (from a variety of sources) should be visualized and how it should be presented for each particular application. Experiments measure the ffectiveness of visualizations for understanding both the static structure and the dynamic behavior of complex systems. A third set of tools involves editing. The project would extend an existing editor to allow programmers to view the system as a single electronic document with dynamic and static links connecting the various software artifacts. These links would be defined either by built-in queries (e.g. go to the definition of a name), by user-defined queries, or by static links.