Programs as information

In any programming system the environment in which a program is constructed is tightly bound to the format of the data used to represent that program. As software development environments are becoming more sophisticated, there is a growing need to get richer representations of programs that allow programs to be treated at a much higher level of abstraction than as sequences of characters in source files.In this paper we explore the use of a database representation as a medium for representing and manipulating programs. We report on the work we did on two different Eclipse plugins exemplifying the potential advantages of such a representation. The first plugin explores the use of a database representation to store programs written in a traditional programming language (Java). The second plugin is part of a research effort to try to define a programming language directly in terms of a database representation.