Visual programming languages employ visual representation to make programming easier and make programs more reliable and more accessible. Visual program testing becomes increasingly important as more and more visual programming languages and visual programming environments come into real use. In this work, we focus on one important class of visual...
Exception handling is a programming language feature that can help increase the reliability of programs. However, not much work has been done on exception handling in visual programming languages. We present an approach for improving the exception handling mechanism in Forms/3, a declarative visual programming language based on the spreadsheet...
The earth is undergoing a “biodiversity crisis” characterized by loss of populations, species, genetic diversity, and ecosystem services. Part of this crisis consists of population declines, extinctions, and increased incidence of deformities in amphibians. It is unknown whether deformities contribute to these declines. Many cases of population declines in amphibians...
Despite years of research into human computer interaction (HCI), the environments programmers must use for problem-solving today—with separate modes and tools for writing, compiling, testing, visualizing, and debugging— derive their basic structure from historical accident, and take little advantage of HCI research into the cognitive issues of programming. Neglecting these...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used visual programming languages (VPLs) today, most are very limited compared to other VPLs, supporting only p few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used end-user programming languages today, they are very limited compared to other programming languages, supporting only a few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
Declarative visual programming languages (VPLs), including spreadsheets, make up a large portion of both research and commercial VPLs. Spreadsheets in particular enjoy a wide audience, including end users. Unfortunately, spreadsheets and most other declarative VPLs still suffer from some of the problems that have been solved in other languages, such...
A weakness of many interactive visual programming languages (VPLs) is their static representations. Lack of an adequate static representation places a heavy cognitive burden on a VPL's programmers, because they must remember potentially long dynamic sequences of screen displays in order to understand a previously-written program. However, although this problem...
Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that...
Full Text:
Lysenko4, Adriana
De Palma1,4, Helen R. P. Phillips1,4, Rebecca A. Senior2, Dominic J. Bennett4, Hollie
ExcelForms is a front end Excel-based application that supports Forms/3, a research
language based on the spreadsheet paradigm, end-user software engineering features.
The old implementation of ExcelForms performed poorly, and was considered
unstable, not robust, and not scalable enough for our users' needs. This project
addresses these issues by implementing...