Design and Implementation of an Editor/Interpreter for a Visual Logic Programming Language

Abstract

The design and implementation of a programming environment including an editor, a debugger and an interpreter engine for Lograph, a general-purpose visual logic programming language, is discussed. The rationale for user-interface design decisions is presented, the goal of which is to increase cognitive support for the creation, exploration and debugging of Lograph programs. The design of the interpreter engine allows for animation of execution in the debugger. The engine takes full advantage of an efficient implementation of Prolog, and operates on a Prolog translation of Lograph programs and queries. The translated Lograph programs are probed with instrumentation code at appropriate places so that applications of Lograph rules are reported to the visual interface of the Lograph debugger as a side effect of the execution of a program.

Towards the Design and Implementation of a Programming Language (Beex)

“…The experimental results showed that the designed interpreter had high efficiency and stability in interpreting the robot program and met the operational requirements of industrial robots. ▪ [11] designed and implemented a programming environment including an editor, a debugger, and an interpreter engine for Lograph, a general-purpose visual logic programming language. The engine takes full advantage of an efficient implementation of Prolog and operates on a Prolog translation of Lograph programs and queries.…”

An Automatic Layout Algorithm for Lograph

“…The design and implementation of a Lograph interpreter with support for animated and single step execution of queries was discussed in [1]. Here, we report on another aspect of the programming environment, presenting the automatic layout algorithm currently used in the Lograph debugger.…”