Generating syntaxfree development environments for real world programming languages
Authors: 
Marcus Riemer, Frank HuchAuthors Info & Claims
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Abstract
The prevailing concept when teaching computer science to beginners in school is visual programming, typically in the form of block based languages. Most approaches in this area involve special teaching languages like Scratch. Our approach connects the block based language concept seamlessly to conventional programming languages used in computer science, but for didactical purpose often to a core subset of such a language.
Generating a block editor for a language is a large effort and often done for every language individually. To tackle this, we developed a generalized framework which supports the development of visual editors for arbitrary formal languages. It is based on a grammar describing the formal language and compiles it to a block based editor interface which uses either our own visual representation or Google Blockly.
Beside presenting the approach through a series of examples, we also sketch applications of the approach for the languages XML, HTML, SQL and JavaScript. Apart from getting a visual editor, our implementation also allows the connection to a backend in the full conventional language, which completes the editor with the common semantics of the language, so that the language can also be executed in the context for which it was developed.
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References
[1]
Hussein Alrubaye, Stephanie Ludi, and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer. 2019. Comparison of Block-Based and Hybrid-Based Environments in Transferring Programming Skills to Text-Based Environments. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1906.03060 arxiv:1906.03060 [cs]
[2]
Gert Braune and Andreas Mühling. 2020. Learning to Program: The Gap between School World and Everyday World. In Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education(WiPSCE ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3421590.3421597
[3]
Neil Fraser. 2015. Ten Things We’ve Learned from Blockly. In 2015 IEEE Blocks and Beyond Workshop (Blocks and Beyond). IEEE, Atlanta, GA, USA, 49–50. https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOCKS.2015.7369000
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W. Hartmann, J. Nievergelt, and R. Reichert. 2001. Kara, Finite State Machines, and the Case for Programming as Part of General Education. In Proceedings IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Cat. No.01TH8587). 135–141. https://doi.org/10.1109/HCC.2001.995251
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Michael Kölling, Neil C. C. Brown, and Amjad Altadmri. 2015. Frame-Based Editing: Easing the Transition from Blocks to Text-Based Programming. In Proceedings of the Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education(WiPSCE ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 29–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818314.2818331
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Sebastian Popp. 2019. Konzeption und Implementierung einer visuellen Lernumgebung zur spielerischen Einführung in die Programmierung. Bachelor. Fachhochschule Wedel, Wedel.
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Philip Wadler. 2003. A Prettier Printer. In The Fun of Programming, Jeremy Gibbons and Oege de Moor (Eds.). Macmillan Education UK, London, 223–243. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-91518-7_11
Index Terms
- Generating syntaxfree development environments for real world programming languages
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Published In
November 2022
65 pages
ISBN:9781450397476
DOI:10.1145/3569173
Copyright © 2022 ACM.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 31 May 2023
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- Refereed limited
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CSERC '22
CSERC '22: The 11th Computer Science Education Research Conference
November 21, 2022
Leiden, Netherlands
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Overall Acceptance Rate 24 of 60 submissions, 40%
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