Static Type Inference for a First-Order Declarative Visual Programming Language with Inheritance

Djang, Rebecca Walpole; Burnett, Margaret; Chen, Roger D.

doi:10.1006/jvlc.1999.0153

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…An interesting enhancement would be the provision of a verification step after the pipeline plumbing phase to detect obvious errors in port connections. This verification could be based on a type system for component ports [37,38] preferably providing edit-time feedback using a static type inference system [39]. A related improvement concerns the topologies that can be implemented.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unix tools as visual programming components in a GUI‐builder environment

Spinellis

2001

Softw Pract Exp

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Development environments based on ActiveX controls and JavaBeans are marketed as "visual programming" platforms; in practice their visual dimension is limited to the design and implementation of an application's graphical user interface (GUI. The availability of sophisticated GUI development environments and visual component development frameworks is now providing viable platforms for implementing visual programming within general-purpose platforms, i.e. for the specification of non-GUI program functionality using visual representations. We describe how specially-designed reflective components can be used in an industry-standard visual programming environment to graphically specify sophisticated data transformation pipelines that interact with GUI elements. The components are based on Unix-style filters repackaged as ActiveX controls. Their visual layout on the development environment canvas is used to specify the connection topology of the resultant pipeline. The process of converting filter-style programs as visual controls is automated using a domainspecific language. We demonstrate the approach through the design and the visual implementation of a GUI-based spelling checker.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unix tools as visual programming components in a GUI‐builder environment

Spinellis

2001

Softw Pract Exp

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“…As in many other applicative languages, type information can be used to help with this task. The current implementation of Forms/3 is dynamically typed, but we are working on a model of static type inference that can operate at the fine-grained level necessary to support similarity inheritance (Djang et al, 2000).…”

Section: Continuing and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm

et al. 2001

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Although detractors of functional programming sometimes claim that functional programming is too difficult or counter-intuitive for most programmers to understand and use, evidence to the contrary can be found by looking at the popularity of spreadsheets. The spreadsheet paradigm, a first-order subset of the functional programming paradigm, has found wide acceptance among both programmers and end users. Still, there are many limitations with most spreadsheet systems. In this paper, we discuss language features that eliminate several of these limitations without deviating from the first-order, declarative evaluation model. The language used to illustrate these features is a research language called Forms/3. Using Forms/3, we show that procedural abstraction, data abstraction and graphics output can be supported in the spreadsheet paradigm. We show that, with the addition of a simple model of time, animated output and GUI I/O also become viable. To demonstrate generality, we also present an animated Turing machine simulator programmed using these features. Throughout the paper, we combine our discussion of the programming language characteristics with how the language features prototyped in Forms/3 relate to what is known about human effectiveness in programming.

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“…Most spreadsheet languages are dynamically typed; hence run-time type errors are one group of errors that can signal exceptions. Although we have experimented with static typing systems for Forms/3 [3,13], they are not a part of this work on exception handling. Our approach to exception handling is presented in the context of the dynamic typing that is usual for spreadsheet languages.…”

Section: A Brief Introduction To Forms/3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exception handling in the spreadsheet paradigm

Burnett

Agrawal

Zee

2000

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Exception handling is widely regarded as a necessity in programming languages today, and almost every programming language currently used for professional software development supports some form of it. However, spreadsheet systems, which may be the most widely used type of "programming language" today in terms of number of users using it to create "programs" (spreadsheets), have traditionally had only extremely limited support for exception handling. Spreadsheet system users range from end users to professional programmers, and this wide range suggests that an approach to exception handling for spreadsheet systems needs to be compatible with the equational reasoning model of spreadsheet formulas, yet feature expressive power comparable to that found in other programming languages. In this paper, we present an approach to exception handling for spreadsheet system users that is aimed at this goal. Some of the features of the approach are new; others are not new, but their effects on the programming language properties of spreadsheet systems have not been discussed before in the literature. We explore these properties, offer our solutions to problems that arise with these properties, and compare the functionality of the approach with that of exception handling approaches in other languages.

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Static Type Inference for a First-Order Declarative Visual Programming Language with Inheritance

Cited by 6 publications

References 35 publications

Unix tools as visual programming components in a GUI‐builder environment

Unix tools as visual programming components in a GUI‐builder environment

Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm

Exception handling in the spreadsheet paradigm

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