Program Explorer: A Program Visualizer for C++
Danny B. Lange and Yuichi Nakamura
IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory
1623-14, Shimotsuruma, Yamato-shi
Kanagawa-ken 242, JAPAN
e-mail: danny@acm.org
Abstract
Despite the obvious advantages of using object-oriented (O-O) program
visualizers in system understanding and debugging, they are still
rarely found in the programmers's tool box. One reason for this that
such visualizers often fail because of their inability to handle
problems of a realistic scale. In our research, we have addressed the
scalability problem by integrating static and dynamic program
information to produce abstract and yet accurate views of complex O-O
systems that often provide more useful information than can be
obtained by reading the source code. This is the approach we followed
in designing Program Explorer, a research prototype for C++ program
visualization, which has been used to examine large O-O systems such
as Stanford's Interviews library and Taligent's CommonPoint
frameworks.
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