Advanced programming environments. Proceedings of an International Workshop, Trondheim, Norway, June 16-18, 1986. (IFIP) (Q1093357)

This workshop on programming environment (PE) was organized by IFIP WG 2.4. The workshop was divided into 7 sessions reviewed below, but many of about 30 papers cover the subjects from several sections. Programming-in-the-small (7 papers): Main attention has been given to questions of structural/syntactical editing, to PEs which use the graphic user interface, and to source level debuggers. The papers describe the experiences with the VisiProg, Chipsy, PegaSys and Garden systems. Also the system for generating PE from a language definition (PGS) has been referred. Programming-in-the-large (7 papers): In contrast to the previous section only few of the papers referred the implemented projects: SunPro and XMS. The research papers reported about some selected problems of program development and maintenance. The paper deals with the design of implementation data base which is tailored to software engineering (SE) problems, and with integrating principles for PE tools. Configuration/version control (3 papers): Typical problems for this section are: sharing objects, side effects of modification, the protection and structuring of teams and products. The papers deal with the theoretical models of ``software manufacture'', with constructing data base of programs and with the integration of version control into programming language. Tool integration (3 papers): Tool integration is one of the most important tasks in PE implementation. Some of its problems are discussed nearly in all the papers in the proceedings. The papers describe the problems of putting together the data in various components of the environment. All papers in this section were dealing with IDL, a data description language, and with a toolkit to exploit IDL for tool integration. Software engineering databases (4 papers): Several approaches to data modeling mostly based on object oriented data bases are described. One paper discusses weakness of file systems and traditional data base systems to support engineering processes. Several projects aiming to develop object-oriented databases are referred. Program reuse and transformation (3 papers): The techniques described in this section are based on systematic program transformation from specification to an executable code. The papers deal with program reuse realized by reusing specification rather than reusing code. The experimental tool (RAP) supporting the development of algebraic specification is described. The calculus for the transformation description is introduced and exemplified. Knowledge-based and future programming environments (6 papers): The papers deal with commercial status-quo (IBM, HP), and with a survey of software engineering. Then knowledge-based editor (KBEmacs) for using programming cliches, and a formal model for describing the structure and dynamics of SE are presented. Each of the sections is completed by a discussion giving the reader the illusion of being present at the workshop, and furthermore, giving an insight into the real problems connected with PE building.