Generating direct manipulation program editors within the MultiView programming environment
Michael Read, Chris D. Marlin · 1996
The MultiView programming environment, which uses a specialisation of the MultiView architecture for multiple view systems, stores program components as abstract syntax trees and unparses these trees into each of the views of interest. One possible limitation of this approach, however, is that the views may be tied too rigidly to the canonical representation employed and suffer from some of the undesirable characteristics of some past language-specific editors. This paper describes some on-going work to investigate novel editing mechanisms which are more flexible and which may thus be more attractive to users than some past editing mechanisms. This work also aims to allow the generation of these views from a description of how the program components should be displayed and manipulated. In this paper, we describe how these ideas have been applied to the specification of direct manipulation editing of program components in MultiView views. 1 Introduction One approach to maintaining mult...