An Interpretive Environment for Operations Support Systems
Thaddeus J. Kowalski, Yean-Ming Huang, Helen V. Diamantidis · AT&T Technical Journal · 1990
We have developed an interactive C programming environment (cens) with integrated facilities to create, edit, browse, execute, and debug C programs. At the heart of cens is a C source-code interpreter, cin, that implements correct and complete C semantics; enables rapid prototyping; performs extensive error checks; facilitates incremental update; manages multiple software views; and provides a programmable command language. In this article, we discuss how a medium-sized software project, the switched access remote test system (SARTS), has benefited from using cin for debugging, software manufacturing, and rapid prototyping. Using SARTS as a case study, we also describe how the interactive environment catches errors and allows corrections “on the fly ”, there by shortening the debug cycle by a factor of 500 percent.