Integrated Programming Environments

An integrated programming environment (IPE) is an interactive program development tool providing the facilities of a language-based editor, an interpreter and a symbolic debugger in a single integrated package. Since there are many different programming languages, not to mention the umpteen application languages, there is a strong incentive to automatically generate these IPEs. Such a generator would take as input a formal specification describing the syntax, semantics and execution facilities for the target language. Current problems in generating the necessary modules for an IPE from the formal specifications will be discussed.