A Domain-Specific Language and Editor for Parallel Particle Methods

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are of increasing importance in scientific high-performance computing to reduce development costs, raise the level of abstraction and, thus, ease scientific programming. However, designing and implementing DSLs is not an easy task, as it requires knowledge of the application domain and experience in language engineering and compilers. Consequently, many DSLs follow a weak approach using macros or text generators, which lack many of the features that make a DSL a comfortable for programmers. Some of these features---e.g., syntax highlighting, type inference, error reporting, and code completion---are easily provided by language workbenches, which combine language engineering techniques and tools in a common ecosystem. In this paper, we present the Parallel Particle-Mesh Environment (PPME), a DSL and development environment for numerical simulations based on particle methods and hybrid particle-mesh methods. PPME uses the meta programming system (MPS), a projectional language workbench. PPME is the successor of the Parallel Particle-Mesh Language (PPML), a Fortran-based DSL that used conventional implementation strategies. We analyze and compare both languages and demonstrate how the programmer's experience can be improved using static analyses and projectional editing. Furthermore, we present an explicit domain model for particle abstractions and the first formal type system for particle methods.Comment: Submitted to ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software on Dec. 25, 201

AN ENVIRONMENT FOR ENGINEERING EXTENDED AFFIX GRAMMAR ENVIRONMENTS

Existing formalisms for the specification of programming environments are complex and strongly biased by the problems of environment generation. It has been investigated whether a simple two-level grammar, describing a programming language, can be used without further modification for the generation of an environment for that language. We believe that there is enough information in most language definitions - albeit implicitly - to generate most of the tools used in syntax-directed editors. This paper proposes some simple and elegant improvements in the use of place- holders and templates, and in the unparsing mechanism. Although the improvements are implemented in a completely newly designed prototype they can also be applied to existing syntax-directed editors to improve their workability

SMILE/ MARVEL: Two Approaches to Knowledge-Based Programming Environments

This technical report consists of three related papers in the area of intelligent assistance for software development and maintenance. Intelligent Assistance without Artificial Intelligence describes SMILE, a software engineering environment that assists teams of programmers without using AI technology. An Architecture for Intelligent Assistance in Software Development presents an AI approach to generalizing the capabilities of SMILE. Granularity Issues in a Knowledge-Based Programming Environment briefly describes MARVEL, an intelligent assistant based on this AI approach, and compares it to SMILE

Incremental Dynamic Semantics for Language-Based Programming Environments

Attribute grammars are a formal notation for expressing the static semantics of programming languages — those properties that can be derived from inspection of the program text. Attribute grammars have become popular as a mechanism for generating language-based programming environments that incrementally perform symbol resolution, type checking, code generation and derivation of other static semantic properties as the program is modified. However, attribute grammars are not suitable for expressing dynamic semantics — those properties that reflect the history of program execution and/or user interactions with the programming environment. This article presents action equations, an extension of attribute grammars suitable for specifying the static and the dynamic semantics of programming languages. It describes how action equations can be used to generate language-based programming environments that incrementally derive static and dynamic properties as the user modifies and debugs the program

ACE: A Cliché-based Program Structure Editor

ACE extends the syntax-directed paradigm of program editing by adding support for programming clichés. A programming cliché is a standard algorithmic fragment. ACE supports the rapid construction of programs through the combination of clichés selected from a cliché library. ACE is also innovative in the way it support the basic structure editor operations. Instead of being based directly on the grammar for a programming language, ACE is based on a modified grammar which is designed to facilitate editing. Uniformity of the user interface is achieved by encoding the modified grammar as a set of clichés.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

An integrated programming environment for pseudo-code development, IPE-PC

An Integrated Programming Environment, IPE-PC, that supports pseudo-code development has been designed and implemented. This environment is based on a Pascal-like language which is designed according to the requirements of a language-based environment. The nucleus of IPE-PC is a language-based editor which represents programs as graphs internally. The same representation is used in every mode of the environment (i.e., editing, compilation, execution, debugging and translation). The system provides facilities to take advantage of both top-down and bottom-up programming. Stepwise refinement has been supported by providing comment structures that can be transformed into procedures. Bottom-up programming is supported because it is possible to create and save program segments which can be inserted to the programs at the appropriate points --Abstract, page ii

Specification of Interpreters and Debuggers Using an Extension of Attribute Grammars

Recent research in programming environments has focused on the generation of software tools from specifications. Several specification mechanisms have been proposed, and the most successful of these has been attribute grammars. Attribute grammars have been successfully applied to compile-time tools such as type checkers and code generators, which perform static analysis of the program, but have hitherto seemed unsuited to the description of run-time tools such as interpreters and debuggers that involve dynamic interaction with the user of the programming environment. This report describes an extension to attribute grammars that solves this problem. The extended attribute grammars are suitable for the specification of all semantics processing performed by single-user programming environments

Gentleman : a lightweight web-based projectional editor

Lors de la conception et la manipulation de logiciel par modélisation, il est avantageux de bénéficier d’un grand degré de liberté au niveau de la présentation afin de comprendre l’information et prendre une action en exerçant peu d’effort cognitif et physique. Cette caractéristique doit aussi s’étendre aux outils que nous employons afin que ceux-ci augmentent nos capacités, plutôt que les restreindre. En génie logiciel, nous travaillons présentement à rehausser encore le niveau d’abstraction afin de réduire le rôle central du code décrit avec un langage de programmation à usage général. Ceci permettrait d’inclure les experts non techniques dans les activités de développement de logiciel. Cette approche, centralisée sur le domaine et l’expert, s’inscrit dans l’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (IDM), où un modèle est produit et manipulé par divers experts et utilisateurs. Le modèle est alors décrit avec un langage créé spécifiquement pour un domaine d’application ou une tache, appelé langage dédié (DSL). Une technique utilisée pour créer ces modèles et leurs DSL est le projectional editing, qui permet d’utiliser des notations diverses interchangeables et d’étendre et composer facilement un langage. Toutefois, les solutions actuelles sont lourdes, spécifiques à une plateforme, et manquent considérablement d’utilisabilité, limitant ainsi l’usage et l’exploitation de cette approche. Pour mieux refléter les avantages du paradigme IDM avec le style projectionnel, nous introduisons dans cette thèse Gentleman, un éditeur projectionnel léger sur le web. Avec Gentleman, le développeur crée un modèle en combinant des concepts utilisés pour définir la structure du modèle et des projections pour les manipuler dans l’éditeur. Nous avons évalué Gentleman à travers une étude basée sur un groupe d’utilisateur. L’étude a confirmé sa capacité à créer et manipuler des modèles efficacement. Les participants ont noté qu’il est facile de prendre en main Gentleman et que l’interface est très intuitive comparativement aux éditeurs existants. Nous avons aussi intégré Gentleman avec succès à une plateforme web, démontrant ainsi ses capacités d’interopérabilité et l’avantage d’une solution web.In software activities and, more specifically, when modeling, the modeler should benefit from as much freedom as possible to understand the presented information and take action with minimal cognitive and mechanical effort. This characteristic should also apply to the tools used in the process so that they extend our capabilities rather than limit them. In the field of software engineering, current work aims to push the level of abstraction past general-purpose programming language into domain-specific modeling. This enables domain experts with various backgrounds to participate in software development activities. This vision is central to model-driven engineering (MDE) where, instead of code, various experts and users produce and manipulate domain-specific language (DSL). In recent years, projectional editing has proven to be a valid approach to creating and manipulating DSLs, as it supports various easily interchangeable notations and enables language extension and composition. However, current solutions are heavyweight, platform-specific, and suffer from poor usability. To better support this paradigm and minimize the risk of accidental complexity in terms of expressiveness, in this thesis, we introduce Gentleman, a lightweight web-based projectional editor. With Gentleman, a developer creates a model by combining concepts used to define its structure and projections to interact and manipulate them in the editor. We have evaluated Gentleman through a user study. The evaluation confirmed its capacity to create and manipulate models effectively. Most participants noted that the editor is very user-friendly and intuitive compared to existing editors. We have also successfully integrated Gentleman into a web application, demonstrating its interoperability and the benefit of a web solution