An Editor for Helping Novices to Learn Standard ML

This paper describes a novel editor intended as an aid in the learning of the functional programming language Standard ML. A common technique used by novices is programming by analogy whereby students refer to similar programs that they have written before or have seen in the course literature and use these programs as a basis to write a new program. We present a novel editor for ML which supports programming by analogy by providing a collection of editing commands that transform old programs into new ones. Each command makes changes to an isolated part of the program. These changes are propagated to the rest of the program using analogical techniques. We observed a group of novice ML students to determine the most common programming errors in learning ML and restrict our editor such that it is impossible to commit these errors. In this way, students encounter fewer bugs and so their rate of learning increases. Our editor, C Y NTHIA, has been implemented and is due to be tested on st..

Extending libSedML to support CellML models

libSedML is a collection of libraries and tools developed in support of the Simulation Experiment Markup Language ("SED-ML":http://sed-ml.org/). "libSedML":http://libsedml.sourceforge.net/ is implemented in C# and provides libraries for processing SED-ML documents and for running the numerical simulations required for the encoded simulation experiment(s). SED-ML supports models encoded in any encoding format, although predominantly expected to be an XML based encoding. To date, however, libSedML has only supported performing simulations using models encoded in the Systems Biology Markup Language ("SBML":http://sbml.org/). The presented project looked at using the "CellML API":http://cellml.org/tools/api to extend libSedML to support simulations using models encoded in CellML.

Using the CellML API, command line utility programs were written (in C++) which performed the functions required by libSedML in order to perform numerical simulations of CellML models. Namely, this involved performing the described simulation with the given CellML model and producing the simulation results in a text file. libSedML was then extended to use these command line utilities as required in the performance of the described simulation experiment. A CellML model specific simulation wizard was also added to libSedML