Z - the 95% program editor
Steven R. Wood · 1981
Recently much attention has been focused on structure-oriented program editors that have specific knowledge about the syntax and semantics of a particular programming language [1, 4, 5, 18]. These editors provide many desirable features for editing programs. However, the user interface is constrained by the syntax and semantics of the target language, and editing operations that are simple in a text editor can be quite complicated in a structure-oriented editor. In addition, the user has an editor that is limited to a single language and must use a different editor for text editing. Existing implementations of structure-oriented editors use a parse-tree representation for a program along with a supporting lexical analyzer, parser, and pretty-printer; this representation significantly complicates the implementation of an editor.