Similarity inheritance: a new model of inheritance for spreadsheet VPLs

Djang, Rebecca Walpole; Burnett, Margaret

doi:10.1109/vl.1998.706156

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The modularity mechanism of Forms/3 is called similarity inheritance [10]. It replaced the symbolic relationship of inheritance with continual copying relationships, established through cut-and-paste operations, resulting in "self-sufficiency".…”

Section: Visual Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subtext

Edwards

2005

SIGPLAN Not.

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Representing programs as text strings makes programming harder then it has to be. The source text of a program is far removed from its behavior. Bridging this conceptual gulf is what makes programming so inhumanly difficult -we are not compilers. Subtext is a new medium in which the representation of a program is the same thing as its execution. Like a spreadsheet, a program is visible and alive, constantly executing even as it is edited. Program edits are coherent semantic transformations.The essence of this new medium is copying. Programs are constructed by copying and executed by copy flow: the projection of changes through copies. The simple idea of copying develops into a rich theory of higher-order continual copying of trees. Notably absent are symbolic names, the workhorse of textual notation, replaced by immediately-bound explicit relationships. Subtext unifies traditionally distinct programming tools and concepts, and enables some novel ones. Ancestral structures are a new primitive data type that combines the features of lists and records, along with unproblematic multiple inheritance. Adaptive conditionals use first-class program edits to dynamically adapt behavior.A prototype implementation shows promise, but calls for much further research. Subtext suggests that we can make programming radically easier, if we are willing to be radical.Text is paper-centric: pen and paper are a complete implementation. Modern software technology allows us to create arbitrary computer-based media, free of the limits of paper. A program can be represented in an abstract data model, and the programmer can use a GUI to directly manipulate [33] that model: WYSIWYG programming. This has long been done with other complex information artifacts, such as spreadsheets, documents, and diagrams. In all these cases, we no longer expect a paper printout to be a complete representation. It is time to transcend paper-centric programming.

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Section: Visual Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subtext

Edwards

2005

SIGPLAN Not.

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“…An advantage of studying spreadsheet systems from a programming language perspective is that there is overwhelming evidence that they are actually usable for programming by end users. We have developed "similarity inheritance" [4], a new approach to inheritance that is suitable for seamless integration into spreadsheet-like visual languages. The approach shows that bringing inheritance functionality to the spreadsheet paradigm can be done using the widely-understood idea of copy/paste.…”

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A composite model checking toolset for analyzing software systems

Bultan

2000

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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point, and to provide deterministic re-execution, we provide I/O logging to capture external inputs from the initial execution that we will replay later upon re-execution. Future DirectionsSo far we have focused our efforts on solving the most challenging research problems of providing a full set of debugging movement commands that operate efficiently in both the forward and a backwards directions. We have tested this extensively and are exceptionally pleased with its performance, but we have not yet unleashed it upon our students for general use in debugging their programs. This is the ultimate test: whether students find the backward movements helpful in more quickly locating the causes of bugs in their programs. We are currently working on user interface level issues in preparation for this next level of evaluation.Model checking has proved to be a successful technique for verifying hardware systems. Given a transition system and a temporal property, model checking procedures exhaustively search the state space of the input transition system to find out if it satisfies the given temporal property. Recently, model checking has been used for analyzing software specifications with encouraging results [CAB + 98]. The state-space of a software specification can be explored using model checking procedures to verify or falsify (by generating counter-example behaviors) its properties. The success of model checking has been partially due to Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) -a data structure that can encode boolean functions in a highly compact format. The main idea in BDD based model checking is to represent sets of system states and transitions as boolean formulas, and manipulate them efficiently using BDDs [McM93]. BDD data structure supports the operations required for model checking: intersection, union, complement, equivalence checking and existential quantifier elimination (used to compute preand post-conditions). This type of model checking is called symbolic since the system states are represented implicitly by BDDs during the state space search.In recent years new symbolic representations have been proposed. For example, HyTech, a symbolic model checker for hybrid systems, encodes real domains using linear constraints on reals [AHI-I96]. Recently, we proposed a model checker for integer based systems, which uses Presburger arithmetic (integer arithmetic without multiplication) constraints as its underlying state representation [BGP97]. Using constraint representations one can verify systems with infinite variable domains (which is not possible using finite representations such as BDDs).Our goal in this project is to develop a toolset which combines various symbolic representations in a single composite model checker. In the composite model checking approach each variable in the input system is mapped to a symbolic representation type [BGL98]. (For example, boolean and enumerated variables can be mapped to BDD representation, and integers can be mapped to Presburger constraint representation.) Then, each atomic ...

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“…Lotus™, Forms/3 [1], Formulate [14], Prograph spreadsheets [13], and Chi et al's visualization spreadsheet language [2]). If not already present, it can easily be gathered "behind the scenes" by a spreadsheet system, such as by maintaining knowledge of the relationships among copied formulas as in [3].…”

Section: Homogeneitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, given a formula graph for a cell X that references Y, du-adequacy is achieved with respect to the interactions between X and Y when each of X's uses (references to Y) 1 of each definition in Y (node directly connected to the exit node in Y's formula graph) has been covered by a test. For example, the du-associations involving Abbott's Final cell (Grades [1,3]) and his Course cell (Grades [1,4]) are (2,5)T, (2,5)F, (2,6), and (2,7), using the node numbers in Figure 2. Hence, under the du-adequacy criterion, Grades [1,4] is tested enough when there has been a successful test in which Grades [1,3] was greater than Grades[1,2]-covering du-associations (2,5)T and (2,6), -and another test in which Grades [1,3] was not greater than Grades[1,2]-covering du-associations (2,5)F and (2,7).…”

Section: The Cell Relation Graph Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Referred to in Figure 3, StaticallyResolve is an O(1) routine that returns the actual cell to which a reference with relative indices resolves. For example, if M [1,3] refers to P[i,j-1], StaticallyResolve(M [1,3],P[i,j-1]) returns P [1,2]. Hence, only du-associations involving the actual grid cells to which C refers are gathered by the system.…”

Section: A Straightforward Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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