Snippets: Support for Drag-and-Drop Programming in the Redwood Environment

This paper presents an overview of the Redwood programming environment and details one of its key features, snippets. Through snippets, developers can both make use of a variety of predefined programming constructs and build their own reusable program components. Languageindependent, snippets are descriptions of program parts that can be as simple as an assignment statement or as complex as a sophisticated optimization algorithm. In Redwood, snippets also provide support for a distinguishing facility of visual environments: direct manipulation via drag-and-drop. An example of working with snippets, including snippet definition, visualization, customization, and mapping to code is also presented in the paper.