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Construction of an interactive programming environment for control of theatrical‐set effects via object‐oriented methods
Author(s) -
Thirion Bernard
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380230606
Subject(s) - computer science , programming language , parsing , scripting language , compiler , syntax , object oriented programming , object (grammar) , grammar , set (abstract data type) , class (philosophy) , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , philosophy , linguistics
Abstract This paper describes the object‐oriented design of a novel application, for control of complex theatricalset effects defined by an appropriate language. Besides giving a general description of the proposed system, the paper presents the language and its programming environment, which is intended for inexperienced users and integrates facilities to create, edit, check and run the effect scripts. The description of the implementation demonstrates the relevance of an object‐oriented approach when it is associated with compiler techniques. The object paradigm is used to build support classes such as character streams, run‐time values or symbols as well as syntactic objects. Each syntactic‐object class models a different LL(1) grammar non‐terminal and allows for an object‐oriented predictive parsing. Moreover, organizing the instances of these classes as an object‐based parse tree simplifies parsing, unparsing, syntax‐directed editing, syntax‐directed help, interpretation, etc. The description of these various operations shows the flexibility of our method, e.g. with respect to an iterative prototyping of the language and its environment.