Journal of Computer Languages最新文献

{"title":"A visual notation for succinct program traces","authors":"Divya Bajaj ,&nbsp;Martin Erwig ,&nbsp;Danila Fedorin","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101199","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Program traces are a widely used representation for explaining the dynamic behavior of programs. They help to make sense of computations and also support the location and elimination of bugs. Unfortunately, program traces can grow quite big very quickly, even for small programs, which compromises their usefulness.</p><p>In this paper we present a visual notation for program traces that supports their concise representation. We explain the design decisions of the notation and compare it in detail with several alternatives. An important part of the trace representation is its flexibility and adaptability, which allows users to transform traces by applying filters that capture common abstractions for trace representations.</p><p>We also present an evaluation of the trace notation and filters on a set of standard examples. The results show that our representation can reduce the overall size of traces by at least 79%, which suggests that our notation is an effective improvement over the use of plain traces in the explanation of dynamic program behavior.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101199"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Handling complex representations in visual modeling tools for MDSD/DSM by means of code generator languages","authors":"Verislav Djukić ,&nbsp;Aleksandar Popović","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101208","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Constructing languages and tools for modeling is an intellectual effort that addresses challenges related to linguistic theory. It requires a high level of creativity and understanding between software engineers and language and domain experts. It is important to consider the context of language application, or the main goal of the work, at the beginning of the language construction process. A new language is not created instantaneously, but rather through a process of iteratively refining the definition of its elements in interaction with the real-world context in which it will be applied. From a pragmatic standpoint, the best way to ensure the correctness of a language’s semantics is to verify it using a reference implementation, although different approaches may be used to describe the semantics of the language. In this paper, we share our experience in developing new and extending the existing functionalities of tools for visual domain-specific modeling to simplify reference implementation. We demonstrate how the code generator language, with minor extensions, can be used for it. Visual modeling tools in MDSD and DSM pay more attention to the graphical representation of objects, and less to relations, roles, and properties. In our platform, objects, roles, and relations are all derived from the same base class, which allows us to distinguish between fifteen different model representation types, ranging from view on the model topology to complex 3D views.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101208"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lexical-based partial redundancy elimination: An optimal algorithm with improved efficiency","authors":"Reshma Roy,&nbsp;Vineeth Paleri","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101204","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Partial redundancy elimination is a well-known optimization in compilers that eliminates the recomputation of equivalent expressions appearing on a path in a program. Morel and Renvoise, in their seminal paper, showed that it is a powerful optimization that subsumes two traditional optimizations, i.e., Common Subexpression Elimination and Loop Invariant Code Motion. Morel and Renvoise’s algorithm is not computationally optimal because partially redundant computations may remain even after the optimization. Later, Knoop et al. came up with an algorithm that is computationally and lifetime optimal. The algorithm by Knoop et al. takes four unidirectional data flow analyses to perform the transformation. Here, we propose a new algorithm for partial redundancy elimination, both computationally and lifetime optimal. The proposed algorithm is more efficient than other best-known algorithms since it takes only three unidirectional data flow analyses. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by implementing it using the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure and comparing the time taken by the algorithm with other selected best-known algorithms. The proposed algorithm reported here is based on lexically equivalent expressions. However, we believe that the ideas in the proposed algorithm can find their use in the value-based approach.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101204"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aesthetics and comprehension of curved 3D graphs in Virtual Reality","authors":"Adam Drogemuller,&nbsp;Andrew Cunningham,&nbsp;James Walsh,&nbsp;James Baumeister,&nbsp;Ross T. Smith,&nbsp;Bruce H. Thomas","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101198","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Studies and evaluations of 3D graph aesthetics beyond the desktop currently remain sparse, despite recent advancements and applications with the emergence of <em>Immersive Analytics</em>. This paper explores curvature aesthetics for the edges within a 3D graph visualisation and presents preliminary implementations to a Lombardi-inspired rendering for an edge. Additionally, we evaluate three approaches to curvature through two studies to compare against straight-lines as a baseline. The two studies focused on observing user preference and performance when navigating a curved graph without and with topological-based tasks in Virtual Reality (VR). We found that curved edges without specified orientations tended to perform worse in performance and preference compared to Lombardi-inspired implementations of edges. Pupillary response and the participant’s approaches to navigation were also observed to be indicative of the edge’s respective performance for topological-based tasks.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101198"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An approach to build JSON-based Domain Specific Languages solutions for web applications","authors":"Enrique Chavarriaga ,&nbsp;Francisco Jurado ,&nbsp;Francy D. Rodríguez","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101203","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Because of their level of abstraction, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) enable building applications that ease software implementation. In the context of web applications, we can find a lot of technologies and programming languages for server-side applications that provide fast, robust, and flexible solutions, whereas those for client-side applications are limited, and mostly restricted to directly use JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, JSON and XML. This article presents a novel approach to creating DSL-based web applications using JSON grammar (JSON-DSL) for both, the server and client side. The approach includes an evaluation engine, a programming model and an integrated web development environment that support it. The evaluation engine allows the execution of the elements created with the programming model. For its part, the programming model allows the definition and specification of JSON-DSLs, the implementation of JavaScript components, the use of JavaScript templates provided by the engine, the use of link connectors to heterogeneous information sources, and the integration with other widgets, web components and JavaScript frameworks. To validate the strength and capacity of our approach, we have developed four case studies that use the integrated web development environment to apply the programming model and check the results within the evaluation engine.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101203"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quantitative program sketching using decision tree-based lifted analysis","authors":"Aleksandar S. Dimovski","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101206","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We present a novel approach for resolving numerical program sketches under Boolean and quantitative objectives. The input is a program sketch, which represents a partial program with missing numerical parameters (holes). The aim is to automatically synthesize values for the parameters, such that the resulting complete program satisfies: a <em>Boolean (qualitative) specification</em> given in the form of assertions; and a <em>quantitative specification</em> that estimates the number of execution steps to termination and which the synthesizer is expected to optimize.</p><p>To address the above quantitative sketching problem, we encode a program sketch as a program family (a.k.a. Software Product Line) and use the specifically designed lifted analysis algorithms based on abstract interpretation for efficiently analyzing program families with numerical features. The elements of the lifted analysis domain are <em>decision trees</em>, in which decision nodes are labeled with linear constraints defined over numerical features and leaf nodes belong to an existing single-program analysis domain. First, we transform a program sketch into a program family, such that numerical holes correspond to numerical features and all possible sketch realizations correspond to variants in the program family. Then, we use a combination of forward (numerical) and backward (quantitative termination) lifted analysis of program families to find the variants (family members) that satisfy all assertions, and moreover are optimal with respect to the given quantitative objective. Such obtained variants represent the “correct &amp; optimal” realizations of the given program sketch.</p><p>We present a prototype implementation of our approach within the <span>FamilySketcher</span>\u0000<!--> <!-->tool for resolving C sketches with numerical data types. We have evaluated our approach on a set of numerical benchmarks, and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach. In some cases, our approach provides speedups against the well-known sketching tool <span>Sketch</span>\u0000<!--> <!-->and resolves some numerical benchmarks that <span>Sketch</span>\u0000<!--> <!-->cannot handle.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101206"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50187261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the Special issue on Methods, Tools and Languages for Model-driven Engineering and Low-code Development","authors":"Geylani Kardas,&nbsp;Federico Ciccozzi,&nbsp;Ludovico Iovino","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2022.101190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2022.101190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101190"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49875706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Students’ difficulties with inserting and deleting nodes in a singly linked list in the C programming language","authors":"Eman Almadhoun,&nbsp;Jennifer Parham-Mocello","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2022.101184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2022.101184","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Since linked lists serve as a bridge to understanding more advanced data structures, we believe that it is critical to identify students’ misunderstandings early. We found that students had a good conceptual understanding of how to insert and delete nodes in a singly linked list in C. However, many students continued to struggle with C syntax, pointer manipulation, and memory management needed to correctly implement singly linked lists. Students reported that the abstract nature of pointers, relating linked lists to the real world, and prior knowledge about dynamic arrays contributed the most to their difficulties with linked lists in C.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101184"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49875705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What about the usability in low-code platforms? A systematic literature review","authors":"Daniel Pinho ,&nbsp;Ademar Aguiar ,&nbsp;Vasco Amaral","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2022.101185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2022.101185","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Context:</h3><p>Low-code development is a concept whose presence has grown both in academia and the software industry and is discussed alongside others, such as model-driven engineering and domain-specific languages. Usability is an important concept in low-code contexts since users of these tools often lack a background in programming. Grey literature articles have also stated that low-code tools have high usability.</p></div><div><h3>Objective:</h3><p>This paper examines the current literature about low-code and no-code to discover more about them and their relationship with usability, particularly its quality, which factors are the most relevant, and how users view these tools. This focus on usability aims to provide a different point of view from other works on low-code.</p></div><div><h3>Method:</h3><p>We performed a systematic literature review based on a formal protocol for this study. The search protocol returned a total of 207 peer-review articles across five databases, which was supplemented with a snowballing process. These were filtered using inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in 38 relevant articles that were analysed, synthesised and reported.</p></div><div><h3>Conclusion:</h3><p>Despite growing interest and a strong enterprise presence in academia, we did not find a formal definition of low-code, although common characteristics have been specified. We found that users have a heightened awareness of usability regarding low-code tools, with some authors performing feasibility studies on their implementations or listing factors that influence the user experience in a given tool. Researchers are considering usability factors unconsciously, and the low-code field would grow if research on usability increased. This paper also suggests a definition for low-code development.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101185"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49903321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A graph-based model for build optimization sequences: A study of optimization sequence length impacts on code size and speedup","authors":"Nilton Luiz Queiroz Jr,&nbsp;Anderson Faustino da Silva","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2022.101188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2022.101188","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Embedded Systems applications have several limitations, one of these limitations is the memory size. Modern compilers provide optimization sequences that reduce the code size, contributing to solve this memory issue. However, the optimization search space is very large, and the same optimization can be applied several times in the same program. Consequently, there is a need to determine the optimization sequence length. Furthermore, sometimes applying optimizations does not result in a significant speedup gain. In this paper, we present an evaluation of optimization sequence lengths, their impact on the code size reduction and speedup increase using a graph-based model to build optimization sequences. The results indicate that is possible to achieve about 15.1% of code size reduction over <span>O0</span>, and also obtain speedups better than <span>O2</span> optimization level, while <span>Oz</span> achieves 15.5% of code size reduction but cannot reach the speedup of <span>O2</span> optimization level.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101188"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49875711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}