Program Visualization: Graphics Support for Software Development

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a program visualization (PV) environment, intended to offer the user an integrated graphics programming support system. The PV environment will capitalize on recent progress in the graphical representation of information, to provide designers and programmers with both static and dynamic (animated) views of systems. PV is currently being implemented to support programming in C, although large portions of the system are independent of the software development language. In this paper we provide an overview of the PV environment, along with a detailed discussion of the technique used to instrument programs.