Preliminary experience from the dice system a distributed incremantal compiling environment

Abstract

Abstracts The DICE system Is a highly Integrated programming environment which provides programmer support in the case where the programming environment resides in a host computer and the program Is running on a target computer that Is connected to the host. Such a system configuration is also suitable for remote debugging and maintenance of production versions of programs that has been installed in a user environment. The system contains tools such as an screen-oriented structure editor, a statement-level incremental compiler, a screen-oriented debugger and a program database. The debugger uses the same facility for pointing and display as does the editor, and it uses the incremental compiler for insertion of breakpoints and statement evaluation. Most of these tools are automatically generated from compact descriptions. This paper describes some aspects of a prototype version of the system and gives some preliminary data on the performance. Also, strategies for implementing portable programming environments are discussed and are exemplified by the DiCE system.