DrJava is a pedagogic programming environment for Java that enables students to focus on designing programs, rather than learning how to use the environment. The environment provides a simple interface based on a "read-eval-print loop" that enables a programmer to develop, test, and debug Java programs in an interactive, incremental fashion. This paper gives an overview of DrJava including its pedagogic rationale, functionality, and implementation.

https://www.cs.rice.edu/~javaplt/papers/sigcse2002.pdf

DrJava: a lightweight pedagogic environment for Java

Interactive systems, such as editors and program development environments, should be explicitly support recovery facilities that permit a user to reverse the effects of past actions and to restore an object to a prior state. A model for interactive systems is presented that allows recovery to be defined precisely and user and system responsibilities to be delineated. Various implementation techniques for supporting recovery are described. Application of a general recovery facility to support reverse execution is discussed. A program development system (called COPE) with extensive recovery facilities, including reverse execution, is described. Keywords: recovery, reverse execution, undo, checkpoint, editor, programming environments.

/pdf/user-recovery-and-reversal-in-interactive-systems-38xklwse3b.pdf

User Recovery and Reversal in Interactive Systems

Software engineering refers to the process of creating software systems. It applies loosely to techniques which reduce high software cost and complexity while increasing reliability and mochfiability. This paper outlines the procedures used in the development of computer software, emphasizing large-scale software development, and pmpomtmg areas where problems exist and solutions have been proposed Solutions from both the management and the programmer points of vtew are then given for many of these problem areas.

/pdf/perspectives-on-software-engineering-2ri4d61stu.pdf

Perspectives on Software Engineering

http://spider.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~kopec/research/sdarticle4.pdf

Understanding and debugging novice programs

Turing, a new general purpose programming language, is designed to have Basic's clean interactive syntax, Pascal's elegance, and C's flexibility.

The Turing programming language

PL/C is a compiler for a dialect for PL/I. The design objective was to provide a maximum degree of diagnostic assistance in a batch processing environment. For the most part this assistance is implicit and is provided automatically by the compiler. The most remarkable characteristic of PL/C is its perseverance—it completes translation of every program submitted and continues execution until a user-established error limit is reached. This requires that the compiler repair errors encountered during both translation and execution, and the design of PL/C is dominated by this consideration.PL/C also introduces several explicit user-controlled facilities for program testing. To accommodate these extensions to PL/I without abandoning compatibility with the IBM compiler, PL/C permits “pseudo comments”—constructions whose contents can optionally be considered either source text or comment.In spite of the diagnostic effort PL/C is a fast and efficient processor. It effectively demonstrates that compilers can provide better diagnostic assistance than is customarily offered, even when a sophisticated source language is employed, and that this assistance need not be prohibitively costly.

/pdf/design-and-implementation-of-a-diagnostic-compiler-for-pl-i-3s4dcz59pj.pdf

Thomas R. Wilcox

Papers

Design and implementation of a diagnostic compiler for PL/I