Program Editing in a Software Development Environment ( DRAFT ) Steven

This paper describes an approach to program editing that is suitable for a modern software development environment. Program editing involves editing whole programs and not just files. Our approach uses the data integration facilities of the Desert environment to combine information about the overall system with that of the file being edited. It is built on top of the commercial word processing tool, FrameMaker, to provide high-quality presentations of both text and graphics. It uses an API to provide both insets supporting different tools for non-textual software artifacts (e.g user interfaces, class diagrams, and visualizations) and formatted program text. The API does minimal incremental parsing to enable the proper formatting and to relate the text being editing to the rest of the system being developed. 1.0 Goals for a Program Editor The key components in a software development environment are the editors that allow the developer to modify the different software artifacts. Multiple editors are typically provided: graphical editors for modifying design diagrams, direct manipulation tools for building user interfaces, text editors for writing code, word processing systems for producing documentation, etc. Our goal in developing a new editor for a programming environment was to integrate these different editors as much as possible, providing a common framework to handle all software artifacts. At the same time we wanted to provide enhanced services to the programmer through the editor. Our primary goal was to provide a true program editor. A program editor must be designed for editing programs, not files. This does not mean that it is a syntax-directed editor. Rather it implies that the editor must be aware that the file being edited is only one small part of a much larger system. The devel1. Support for this research was provided by the NSF under grants CCR9111507 and CCR9113226, by DARPA order 8225, by ONR grant N00014-91-J-4052, and by support from Sun Microsystems and NYNEX.