Bridging the gulf between code and behavior in programming
Henry Lieberman, Christopher Henry Fry · 1995
Program debugging can be an expensive, complex and frustrating process. Conventional programming environments provide little explicit support for the cognitive tasks of diagnosis and visualization faced by the programmer. ZStep 94 is a program debugging environment designed to help the programmer understand the correspondence between static program code and dynamic program execution. Some of ZStep 94's innovations include: • An animated view of program execution, using the very same display used to edit the source code • A window that displays values which follows the stepper's focus • An incrementally-generated complete history of program execution and output • "Video recorder " controls to run the program in forward and reverse directions and control the level of detail displayed • One-click access from graphical objects to the code that