A Framework for Automatic Algorithm Animation
Yi Lin · 1991
Algorithm animation and data visualization have been shown to help people understand the behavior of algorithms and programs. Different approaches to algorithm animation and data visualization have been tried, but all the existing systems have drawbacks. On one hand, algorithm animation systems can generate nice animations, but users have to modify the original program and code the animation scenes by hand. On the other hand, data visualization systems are more automated, but they do not support smooth illustration of abstract operations and are not sufficiently general and flexible. This research proposes another approach to data visualization and algorithm animation. Through automatic insertion of code, the manual modification of programs is avoided. By analyzing programs at preprocessing time instead of at run time, the program being monitored is made more efficient. By putting data objects and image objects into classes, the reusability of the animation methods and the flexibility ...