A Visual Environment Organizing the Class Hierarchy for Object-Oriented Programming

Takashi HAGINIWA  Morio NAGATA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E78-D  No.9  pp.1150-1155
Publication Date: 1995/09/20
Online ISSN: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Knowledge Based Software Engineering)
Category: Support Systems
Keyword: 
object-oriented programming,  smalltalk,  visual environment,  hierarchy of classes, 

Full Text: PDF

Summary: 
Object-oriented programming requires different skills from those of traditional structured programming. Thus, a good interactive environment for beginners of object-oriented programming should be provided. We have designed and implemented a visual environment of object-oriented programming for beginners. If a programmer draws a diagram of the tree of the hierarchy of classes visually by using our tool, the relationship between superclasses and subclasses are automatically established. Moreover, in order to prevent careless mistakes to override methods, the prototype environment in the Smalltalk language checks written methods. We conducted an experiment with our tool and evaluated its usefulness.