Putting it in context: a syntactic theory of incremental program construction
Shinn-Der Lee · 1996
The ability to construct programs in an incremental fashion is a premise of popular programming paradigms such as modular programming, object-oriented programming, and interactive programming. Incremental program development amounts to filling the holes of well-planned program contexts with new experimental components, or assembling new programs from previously developed and thoroughly tested components, or a combination of both. Its popularity lies in the flexibilities it provides for reusing existing program components and program structures. The benefits of constructing programs incrementally are reduced demand on human and computing resources, faster turn-around time, and enhanced program reliability. We present a schema for enhancing programming languages with incremental program construction capabilities based on the notion of program contexts. By perceiving fully-evolved program contexts (proper parse trees) as compiled code, partiallyevolved program contexts (improper parse tre...