Augmenting Source Code Lines with Sample Variable Values
This addresses the difficulty for developers in understanding code by providing ambient runtime data, but it is incremental as it builds on existing debugging concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of source code being abstract and hard to understand by proposing RuntimeSamp, an approach that collects and displays sample variable values during normal program executions in the editor, aiming to aid debugging without explicit requests.
Source code is inherently abstract, which makes it difficult to understand. Activities such as debugging can reveal concrete runtime details, including the values of variables. However, they require that a developer explicitly requests these data for a specific execution moment. We present a simple approach, RuntimeSamp, which collects sample variable values during normal executions of a program by a programmer. These values are then displayed in an ambient way at the end of each line in the source code editor. We discuss questions which should be answered for this approach to be usable in practice, such as how to efficiently record the values and when to display them. We provide partial answers to these questions and suggest future research directions.