Interactive animation of visual program execution

Software visualization refers to graphical views on computer programs in general. There are only few attempts towards animation systems of visual program execution. Since programming languages nowadays are more or less complete software development environments such tools are extremely desirable also in the area of visual languages. The paper reports on the integration of such an animation tool into the visual language VisaVis taking possible parallel evaluations into account. In order to support abstractness the user can skip possibly less interesting parts of a visual program during the animation