Animators for Generated Programming Environments

Animation of execution is a necessary feature of source-level debuggers. We present a framework where animators are generated from existing algebraic specifications of interpreters. To this end, a pattern-matching mechanism is used in conjunction with origin tracking, a generic tracing technique. The generation of animators is illustrated using an example language named CLaX, a Pascal relative. We study how our approach can be extended to the generation of source-level debuggers and algorithmic debuggers from specifications of interpreters.

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