Towards Syntax-Aware Editors for Visual Languages

Abstract

Editors for visual languages should provide a user-friendly environment supporting end users in the composition of visual sentences in an effective way. Syntax-aware editors are a class of editors that prompt users into writing syntactically correct programs by exploiting information on the visual language syntax. In particular, they do not constrain users to enter only correct syntactic states in a visual sentence. They merely inform the user when visual objects are syntactically correct. This means detecting both syntax and potential semantic errors as early as possible and providing feedback on such errors in a non-intrusive way during editing. As a consequence, error handling strategies are an essential part of such editing style of visual sentences.In this work, we develop a strategy for the construction of syntax-aware visual language editors by integrating incremental subsentence parsers into free-hand editors. The parser combines the LR-based techniques for parsing visual languages with the more general incremental Generalized LR parsing techniques developed for string languages. Such approach has been profitably exploited for introducing a noncorrecting error recovery strategy, and for prompting during the editing the continuation of what the user is drawing.