ChyPro: A Hypermedia Programming Environment for Smalltalk-80

Abstract

Smalltalk-80 has introduced the use of interactive programming tools such as browsers, inspectors and debuggers which brought a major improvement on conventional text files based programming environments. However, they still heavily depend on character string representations of code and data and, as such, inherit all the known limitations of text. In this paper, we describe new versions of the Smalltalk-80 programming tools that transcend these limits, based on hypermedia techniques such as outlines, links, annotations and graphics and on direct manipulation interfaces. Particularly, the new tools allow:

• browsing simultaneously scattered pieces of software through multiple points of view,

• interleaving graphical and textual representations of Smalltalk code, documentation and data,

• structuring, organizing and linking heterogeneous or distant pieces of code or documentation.

ChyPro stands for Computed Hypermedia Programming.