A persistent programming environment for teaching object-oriented concepts

This paper describes a programming environment designed specifically for use in a teaching role and the idealised object-oriented programming language it supports. The basis for the environment´s implementation lies in its manipulation of the underlying abstract syntax representation of an application. Such representations may be split and merged and are held in a persistent store. Users interact with the environment via a structure-editor which ensures syntactic correctness and enables incremental semantic checking. Applications developed with the environment can be unparsed into the idealised programming language supported by the environment, and also into the commonly used languages C++ and Java.