Experiences with an environment generation system

The authors report on research experience using the Gandalf environment generation system as a prototyping vehicle for the Inscape environment. A Gandalf-based environment consists of four parts: a structure editor kernel, which is simply linked into each executable, a set of grammar tables describing the language to the kernel in terms of its abstract syntax, one or more concrete syntax views, and a collection of action routines written in the extension language, ARL. Positive aspects of the research included experimentation, incremental evolution, multiple views, the coupling of semantic and editing actions, and the use of domain-specific facilities. Negative aspects consisted primarily of problems with presentation and object management