Regular Programming Languages Research Articles

IslayTouch: an educational visual programming environment for tablet devices

Educational programming languages are programming languages that have been designed for users without programming experience, with the purpose of teaching them the skill of logical thinking or as an introduction to regular programming languages. Although these languages are relatively easier for beginners, difficult concepts of regular programming languages are still being introduced into some of them. As a new approach to this problem, an educational visual programming environment called Islay has been developed, in which the concept of state-transition diagram is used to compose a program. As a result, Islay becomes even easier for beginners than some other educational programming languages. In this research, a new version of Islay is developed as an Android application, with more features being added and a new user interface that is suitable for tablet devices.

Model-based programming environments for spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can be seen as a flexible programming environment. However, they lack some of the concepts of regular programming languages, such as structured data types. This can lead the user to edit the spreadsheet in a wrong way and perhaps cause corrupt or redundant data.We devised a method for extraction of a relational model from a spreadsheet and the subsequent embedding of the model back into the spreadsheet to create a model-based spreadsheet programming environment. The extraction algorithm is specific for spreadsheets since it considers particularities such as layout and column arrangement. The extracted model is used to generate formulas and visual elements that are then embedded in the spreadsheet helping the user to edit data in a correct way.We present preliminary experimental results from applying our approach to a sample of spreadsheets from the EUSES Spreadsheet Corpus.Finally, we conduct the first systematic empirical study to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. A set of spreadsheet end users worked with two different model-based spreadsheets, and we present and analyze here the results achieved.

Orthogonal languages: A framework for program development

Debugging, performance measurement, program testing, visualization and program modifications are some of the activities undertaken during program development. Since these activities require programming, this paper proposes a language, called an Orthogonal Language, that can be used to write both regular programs and development activities programs. An orthogonal language contains the regular programming language but must also have features that may not be in a regular language such as concurrency, exception handling and access to the run-time environment. Despite the added features, the orthogonal language is almost identical to the regular language. Development activities are programmed as fragments of programs that are inserted interactively into a regular program being developed. Fragments are supported by an extension of the scope and visibility rules of the regular language. Translation rules merge fragments into the executable image of the regular program without changing the source of the regular program. The source of fragments is also maintained.