Principled design of logical fisheye views of functional expressions
J. Ángel Velázquez‐Iturbide · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 2006
We face the problem of simplifying automatically the visualization of expressions in an eager functional language. The problem is relevant for debugging in a programming environment, based on a rewriting model of expression evaluation that displays large intermediate expressions. The simplification technique must filter automatically the parts of an expression which are not interesting for debugging/understanding. We propose the use of logical fisheye views because they provide a balance between showing global context and local information (focus). A straightforward implementation of fisheye views displays too simplified expressions. In the article, we identify five design requirements and describe how they are satisfied. We also include several examples, a discussion and related work.