A Generic Back-End for Exploratory Programming

A Language-Parametric Approach to Exploratory Programming Environments

“…In our extended approach, an alternative version of the exploring algorithm is used and has been implemented as a modification to the generic algorithm of [11]. This algorithm labels the nodes of the execution graph with references rather than configurations and a mapping from references to configurations is maintained separately.…”

“…This work reports on the next step in a research line aimed at designing and implementing features that simplify exploratory programming in (general-purpose and domain-specific) programming environments. Previous work has demonstrated how software languages can be (re-)designed to enable exploratory programming with 'execution graphs' encoding execution histories as a central datastructure [11,33,60]. This paper contributes by presenting a protocol for interacting with execution graphs alongside an architecture designed for prototyping exploratory programming features.…”

“…In this section we describe the main concepts using a basic calculator language as an example object language defined in Rascal [25]. In the next section we extend the approach based on observations made in [11]. The (abstract) syntax of the calculator language is as follows: In the approach, a language is defined by its abstract syntax, the syntax of configurations, an initial configuration, and a definitional interpreter.…”

“…The exploring interpreter algorithm supports three actions: execute for executing programs and extending the execution graph, revert for changing the configuration used as input for the next execute action, and display for producing a structural representation of the current graph. The algorithm can be implemented generically, taking as type-level arguments the type of programs and configurations, and as (value-level) arguments a definitional interpreter and initial configuration of the correct types [11]. In this sense, the approach is (object) language-parametric.…”

“…In [11], Frölich and Van Binsbergen describe an implementation of the exploring interpreter algorithm and use it to evaluate the effects of certain implementation choices on the exploratory process. The authors conclude that the algorithm should support both a destructive and non-destructive variant of revert and that a tree view is easier to reason about since cycles are absent and there is a unique path from the root to every node ś every node has a unique history.…”