Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces
Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces by Michael Homer A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2014 Abstract Grace is a programming language under development aimed at ed- ucation. Grace is object-oriented, imperative, and block-structured, and intended for use in first- and second-year object-oriented programming courses. We present a number of language features we have designed for Grace and implemented in our self-hosted compiler. We describe the design of a pattern-matching system with object-oriented structure and minimal extension to the language. We give a design for an object-based module system, which we use to build dialects, a means of extending and restricting the language available to the programmer, and of implementing domain-specific languages. We show a visual programming interface that melds visual editing (à la Scratch) with textual editing, and that uses our dialect system, and we give the results of a user experiment we performed to evaluate the usability of our interface. ii ii Acknowledgments The author wishes to acknowledge: • James Noble and David Pearce, his supervisors; • Andrew P. Black and Kim B. Bruce, the other designers of Grace; • Timothy Jones, a coauthor on a paper forming part of this thesis and contributor to Minigrace; • Amy Ruskin, Richard Yannow, and Jameson McCowan, coauthors on other papers; • Daniel Gibbs, Jan Larres, Scott Weston, Bart Jacobs, Charlie Paucard, and Alex Sandilands, other contributors to Minigrace; • Gilad Bracha, Matthias Felleisen, and the other (anonymous) review- ers of papers forming part of this thesis; • the participants in his user study; • David Streader, John Grundy, and Laurence Tratt, examiners of the thesis; • and Alexandra Donnison, Amy Chard, Juanri Barnard, Roma Kla- paukh, and Timothy Jones, for providing feedback on drafts of this thesis.
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