A framework for generating language-oriented environments for visual programming languages

Considerable effort has been directed towards the development of tools for the inherently complex task of software programming. One method to assist a programmer is to integrate several language specific tools into one intgrated language oriented environment; a execution. We propose a uniform specification framework for the generation of language-oriented environments for visual programming languages. Visual programming languages are specified by their abstract syntax, concrete syntax, static and dynamic semantics as well as edit semantics. In this paper , we introduce an extension to attribute grammars: attributed graph-link grammars (AGLGs). In an AGLG, non-local productions define graph-links, and graph-link attributes define non-local attribute dependencies. We also present a visualization model for AGLG's where the visualization process is regarded as a composition of mappings from attribute values to colors on a viewing surface. Further, a specialization of structural operational semantics is developed which is espesially tuned for the dynamic semantics of visual language