The Design of a Completely Visual Object-Oriented Programming Language

Object-oriented languages provide powerful programming features such as polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic dispatch. While these features allow complex programs to be written more easily, they also make debugging and understanding these programs more di cult. Object-oriented languages have relied on simple visualization tools such as class browsers to aid programmers in understanding their programs. In this paper, we argue that a completely visual object-oriented programming language, Vipr, has signi cant advantages over textual objectoriented languages. We describe how Vipr represents all aspects of object-oriented programs including objects, classes, inheritance, polymorphism, and dynamic dispatch. By completely visual, we mean that the semantics of programs written in our language can be entirely described by simple graphical rules. Vipr provides a framework for and integrates existing methods of understanding the structure and execution of visual programs. Also, we discuss the programming environment support required by Vipr and argue why the language, with this environment, will be usable by expert programmers for solving large problems.