Visual programming with Interaction Nets

Programming directly with diagrams offers potential advantages such as visual intuitions, identification of errors (debugging), and insight into the dynamics of the algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to put forward one particular graphical formalism, interaction nets, as a candidate for visual programming which has not only all the desired properties that one would expect, but also has other benefits as a language, for instance sharing computation.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Functional programming and program transformation with interaction nets

Techon. Report DI-PURe 05.05.02.In this paper we propose to use Interaction Nets as a formalism for Visual Functional Programming. We consider the use of recursion patterns and introduce a suitable archetype/instantiation mechanism for interaction agents. We also consider program transformation by fusion, a well-known transformation technique, and show that this extends smoothly to our visual programming framework. Examples of applying this technique include transformations of two-pass functions into single-pass ones, and the introduction of accumulations

Heat — An Interactive Development Environment for Learning & Teaching Haskell

Using a separate editor and interpreter provides many distracting obstacles for inexperienced students learning a programming language. Professional interactive development environments, however, confuse these students with their excessive features. Hence this paper presents Heat, an interactive development environment specially designed for novice students learning the functional programming language Haskell. Based on teaching experience, Heat provides a small number of features and is easy to use. Heat proves that a small portable interactive development environment can be implemented on top of but independent of a particular Haskell interpreter. Heat with Hugs has been used in teaching functional programming at the University of Kent for the past three years

Visual programming with recursion patterns in interaction nets

In this paper we propose to use Interaction Nets as a formalism for Visual Functional Programming. We consider the use of recursion patterns as a programming idiom, and introduce a suitable archetype/instantiation mechanism for interaction agents, which allows one to define agents whose behaviour is based on recursion patterns.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Iterators and interaction

Eigth International Workshop on Computing with Terms and Graphs (TERMGRAPH’09), 2009We propose a method for encoding iterators (and recursion operators in general) using interaction nets. There are two main applications for this: the method can be used to obtain a visual notation for functional programs, in a visual programming system; and it can be used to extend the existing translations of the λ-calculus into interaction nets (that have been proposed as efficient implementation mechanisms) to languages with recursive types. This work can also be seen as a study of the relation between interaction net programming and functional programming

First Class Copy & Paste

The Subtext project seeks to make programming fundamentally easier by altering the nature of programming languages and tools. This paper defines an operational semantics for an essential subset of the Subtext language. It also presents a fresh approach to the problems of mutable state, I/O, and concurrency.Inclusions reify copy & paste edits into persistent relationships that propagate changes from their source into their destination. Inclusions formulate a programming language in which there is no distinction between a programÂs representation and its execution. Like spreadsheets, programs are live executions within a persistent runtime, and programming is direct manipulation of these executions via a graphical user interface. There is no need to encode programs into source text.Mutation of state is effected by the computation of hypothetical recursive variants of the state, which can then be lifted into new versions of the state. Transactional concurrency is based upon queued single-threaded execution. Speculative execution of queued hypotheticals provides concurrency as a semantically transparent implementation optimization

Interactive Visual Functional Programming

An interactive graphical environment for supporting the development and use of Haskell applications programs is described. The environment, named Vital, is particularly intended for supporting the open-ended, incremental development style often preferred by non-specialist users in which successive steps of program development are motivated and informed by results so far obtained.Significant features of Vital include: the graphical display of data structures in a format defined by a datatype-indexed stylesheet, the way that evaluation of (possibly infinite) values is demand-driven by the action of the user scrolling around an unbounded workspace, and support for copy-and-paste graphical editing of data structures. This latter allows, for example, the user to modify a complex data structure by point-and-click operations, or to create (by functional evaluation) a regular data structure and then edit values or expressions into it. The effect of each editing operation is immediately reflected in the Haskell program source code