VIPR AND THE VISUAL PROGRAMMING CHALLENGE

ae Visual Programming Challenge (VPC) provides a framework for explori ng visual programming language issues in a quasi-real-time environment and for comparing competing languages. VIPR is an attempt to bring th e traditional strengths of textual imperative languages to a visual pr ogramming language. It leverages these strengths to make use of well-u nderstood design and abstraction methodologies while providing additio nal visual features, such as explicit representations, contextual info rmation, and execution animation. VIPR uses these strengths and featur es to address the quasi-realtime problem posed by the VPC, whose requi rements include interaction with the low-level vehicle manipulation co de, map exploration and display, as well as additional requirements su ch as flexibility of solution and performance demands. Our solution do es not directly address pedagogical issues or the value of VIPR's simp le graphical semantics. It did point out weaknesses with VIPR's approa ch to solving the scalability problem in visual programming languages. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.