A user interface for a programming environment /

Poor user interfaces in programming environments detract from environments' power and ineffectively communicate with users. Moreover, specification, development, testing, and modification of these usually large, complex, and handcrafted user interfaces are difficult, error prone, slow, and costly. An alternative is user-interface generation. This thesis deals with two primary issues: xmupe2, a user-friendly user interface for the MUPE-2 programming environment, and user-interface generation. Implemented in Modula-2 and C for the X Window System, xmupe2 shows MUPE-2's character with: windows tailored to program-fragments, textual and graphical representations of fragments' contents, and editing commands fired by context-sensitive mouse-based menus. Secondly, and because of the effort in handcrafting xmupe2, the thesis introduces MUISL, an experimental event-driven user-interface specification language. MUISL defines user-interface objects with inheritable classes, attributes, and actions. Then presented in muigen--a flexible, table-driven, and MUISL-based user-interface generator. Both MUISL and muigen simplify user-interface development, as exemplified in the thesis