Lava – An ObjectOriented RAD Language Designed for Ease of Learning, Use, and Program Com.pdfVIP

Lava – An Object-Oriented RAD Language Designed for Ease of Learning, Use, and Program Comprehension 1 1 Klaus D. Günther , Irmtraut Günther 1 GMD, Institute for Secure Telecooperation, Rheinstr. 75, D-64295 Darmstadt, Germany {Klaus.Guenther, Irmtraut.Guenther}@darmstadt.gmd.de Abstract. The growing demand for new software calls for a considerable accel- eration of the software production process and for a sensible relaxation at the software maintenance front. These goals can be achieved only if we can deci- sively increase the degree of modularity, variability, comprehensibility of soft- ware, or short: the degree of structured programming, as well as the simplicity of program manipulation, restructuring, and transformation. The experimental obj ect-oriented language “Lava” and the associated programming environment “LavaPE” attempt to achieve these goals by providing quite a number of un- usual features. The most remarkable features are: 1. Text editors are completely replaced with Lava-specific structure editors. 2. A Lava class consists of a pub- lic “interface” and a completely separate, exchangeable “implementation” which may be stored in a different file. 3. Frameworks and design patterns are supported in a very natural way by allowing packages and interfaces to have overridable type parameters. 1 Introduction The continuously growing demand for new software can be supplied only if the pro- ductivity of the programming process can be decisively increased. (Cf. section 3 of the PITAC Report [10] to the American government, which assigns maximum prior- ity to this goal.) Moreover,