Computer Science Technical Reports
CS at VT

An Interactive Environment For Tool Selection, Specification and Composition

Arthur, James D. (1986) An Interactive Environment For Tool Selection, Specification and Composition. Technical Report TR-86-02, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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Abstract

This paper describes a high-level, screen oriented programming environment that supports problem solving by tool selection and tool composition. Each tool is a powerful parameterized program that performs a single high-level operation (e.g., sort a file). To solve a given problem, the user first interacts with the system to compose a task overview consisting of a sequence of generic operations. Such sequences are called compositions. Once an overview is established, a second part of the environment interacts with the user to help expand the generic operations into a corresponding sequence of parameterized tool calls. When a composition is expanded to include details such as parameterization and punctuation it is called a script. This script, when executed by the underlying runtime system, computes a solution to the specified user task. The current environment runs under the Unix operating system on a VAX 11/785, and uses a Bitgraph terminal with a 640x720 bitmap display and standard keyboard as the principal interface device.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Subjects:Computer Science > Historical Collection(Till Dec 2001)
ID Code:9
Deposited By:User autouser
Deposited On:13 October 2005