Automatic Generation of Editors for Higher-Order Data Structures

With generic functional programming techniques, we have eased GUI programming by constructing a programming toolkit with which one can create GUIs in an abstract and compositional way, using type-directed Graphical Editor Components (GECs). In this toolkit, the programmer specifies a GUI by means of a data model instead of low-level GUI programming. In earlier versions of this toolkit, the data model must have a first-order type. In this paper we show that the programming toolkit can be extended in two ways, such that the data model can contain higher-order data structures. We added support for dynamic polymorphic higher-order editors using the functional shell Esther. By combining the earlier developed techniques of generic GECs, abstract editors, we also added statically typed higher-order editors. In principle this solution extends our GUI programming toolkit with the full expressive power of functional programming languages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: APLAS
• Authors: Peter Achten, Marko C. J. D. van Eekelen, Rinus Plasmeijer, Arjen van Weelden
• Keywords: APLAS 2004, Data Model, Functional Programming, Programming Toolkit