Adding Interactive Visual Syntax to Textual Code
This addresses a challenge for programmers dealing with complex structures like graphs and trees, offering an incremental improvement to existing textual programming environments.
The paper tackles the problem of representing geometrical concepts in code by proposing a mechanism to add visual syntax to textual programming languages, demonstrating feasibility with a prototype and outlining adaptation plans.
Many programming problems call for turning geometrical thoughts into code: tables, hierarchical structures, nests of objects, trees, forests, graphs, and so on. Linear text does not do justice to such thoughts. But, it has been the dominant programming medium for the past and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This paper proposes a novel mechanism for conveniently extending textual programming languages with problem-specific visual syntax. It argues the necessity of this language feature, demonstrates the feasibility with a robust prototype, and sketches a design plan for adapting the idea to other languages.