9312570 Vander This project will develop demonstrational, visual programming techniques and determine in which contexts programmers prefer them to textual programming techniques. An interactive, two-view environment will be provided in which users can create programs by manipulating concrete pictorial, examples of data structures or by entering code into a textual editor. Users will be able to create journal- quality pictures of data structures, such as arrays, lists, trees, and graphs, fill in example values. The system will use various inferencing strategies to construct appropriate general-purpose code. Users will be able to move back and forth between the visual and textual editors, using whichever representation is most natural. By providing both a visual and a textual representation, it should be possible to determine those operations which a programmer views as intrinsically textual. Ultimately these observations should allow better programming environments to be built that provide alternative ways of creating programs. ***
