III—an integrated interactive incremental programming environment based on compilation

Abstract

A large variety of tools for program development are available today. The tools tend to become more and more sophisticated, but are usually isolated utilities that have to be applied one by one. An alternative to the tool-box approach is an integrated programming environment utilizing powerful interaction facilities. The design and a prototype implementation of an integrated programming environment is described and the qualities of such a system are discussed. One important design goal was to obtain an environment which has an execution efficiency comparable to that of a system based on a conventional compiler, and a reasonable interaction speed. For this reason the system is based on incremental translation to native code. Another goal was to obtain incremental execution, i.e. the possibility to modify an executing program. The properties of this mechanism and its consequences are investigated.