11 research outputs found
A pretty-printer for every occasion
Tool builders dealing with many different languages, and language designers require sophisticated pretty-print techniques to minimize the time needed for constructing and adapting pretty-printers. We combined new and existing pretty-print techniques in a generic pretty-printer that satisfies modern pretty-print requirements. Its features include language independence, customization, and incremental pretty-printer generation. Furthermore, we emphasize that the recent acceptance of XML as international standard for the representation of structured data demands flexible pretty-print techniques, and we demonstrate that our pretty-printer provides such technology
Pretty-printing within the ASF+SDF meta-environment : a generic approach
The automatic generation of formatters for (programming) languages within the Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment is a research topic that is concerned with the construction of language specific formatters (or pretty-printers) given a language definition in Sdf. In this paper, we give an overview of pretty-printers that have been developed within this project and observe that these pretty-printers are either language dependent or non-customizable. Language independence and customizability are inevitable properties of pretty-printers however, when faced with the problem of formatting many different, evolving languages. Therefore, we introduce in this paper a generic framework for pretty-printing and describe an instantiation of the framework that forms a language independent and customizable pretty-printer
Model-based programming environments for spreadsheets
Spreadsheets can be seen as a flexible programming environment. However, they lack some of the concepts of
regular programming languages, such as structured data types. This can lead the user to edit the spreadsheet in a
wrong way and perhaps cause corrupt or redundant data.
We devised a method for extraction of a relational model from a spreadsheet and the subsequent embedding of
the model back into the spreadsheet to create a model-based spreadsheet programming environment. The extraction
algorithm is specific for spreadsheets since it considers particularities such as layout and column arrangement. The
extracted model is used to generate formulas and visual elements that are then embedded in the spreadsheet helping
the user to edit data in a correct way.
We present preliminary experimental results from applying our approach to a sample of spreadsheets from the
EUSES Spreadsheet Corpus.
Finally, we conduct the first systematic empirical study to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach.
A set of spreadsheet end users worked with two different model-based spreadsheets, and we present and analyze here
the results achieved.This work is funded by ERDF European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-010048. The first author is supported by the FCT grant SFRH/BPD/73358/2010