Generating Uniform User-Interfaces for Interactive Programming Environments
Jan Willem Cornelis Koorn

Abstract:
The ASF+SDF Meta-environment is an interactive development environment
for writing specifications in ASF+SDF. This is an algebraic formalism
that is, among others, used to generate interactive programming
environments. An ASF+SDF specification consists of two parts: the
syntax, and the semantics of a programming, or specification language.
The semantic part contains ``tools'' such as type checkers, program
transformers, compilers, etc.

One of the unique aspects of the ASF+SDF Meta-environment is the
integration of the development environment and the generated
environment into one interactive system. In other words, during the
development of an ASF+SDF specification one can use this immediately
in the generated programming environment.

The user-interface of the ASF+SDF Meta-environment consists of a set
of syntax-directed editors. Each editor is parameterized with a
context-free language definition for the syntax, and an optional set
of tools. The editor supports both text- and structure-oriented
operations on programs.

After the specification of ``tools'' these tools have to be connected
to, for example, a button in the user-interface of one or more
editors. If a user clicks such a button the program that is being
edited is passed on to the tool, and the output of the tool is to be
presented to the user.

The research in this thesis has concentrated on building a generic
syntax-directed editor and connecting the tools to this editor. The
following subjects are addressed:

\begin{itemize}
\item Integration of text and structure editing,
\item Combining an existing text editor (emacs) with an existing structure
      editor (gse) into a hybrid editor,
\item Connecting specific tools to a user-interface of an editor, and
      specification of user dialogues with SEAL (Semantics-directed Environment
      Adaptation Language) which was developed for this purpose, and
\item Specification of a structure editor in ASF+SDF and its user-interface in
      SEAL.
\end{itemize}

Where possible, generation techniques were used to obtain the necessary
software, for example, the SEAL type checker and compiler were fully specified
in ASF+SDF, compiled into a C program and linked to the Meta-environment. 

This research has resulted in uniform user-interfaces for both the
development of ASF+SDF specifications as well as for the programming
environment generated from it.