| The General User Interactive Design Environment (GUIDE) is an interactive programming environment for software development which makes effective use of a graphical user interface. A prototype has been implemented for Modula-2 on a Sun workstation using Smalltalk-80. It provides a set of integrated tools that support program creation, modification, execution and debugging. This thesis describes the runtime environment and the debugger view in GUIDE. The debugger view provides a consistent user interface to examine and control the internal runtime structure--a collection of statement trees and activation records. The statement trees are incrementally built as the user is coding the program and the activation records are dynamically allocated at the activation of procedures or functions. Editing capability and incremental compilation within the debugger view allow the user to use it as a single tool for editing, compiling and debugging. In addition, it offers many innovative features such as forward and backward execution, execution history replay and pictorial display of data structures. With its graphical capability, it produces the effects of animation of the flow of execution and in-place updates of data structures. The implementation of many desirable features will help to increase productivity and reduce costs in software development. |
