Jorma Sajaniemi
Programmers' mental representations of programs do not obey the order, form and immediate content of program text. Multiple visible representations, or views, of a program supports programmers in constructing mental representations that they need in, e.g., maintenance tasks.
VinEd is a language independent program editor that supports an unlimited number of views of the program text. Programmers can use predefined views and create their own views by defining filtering functions. Programs can be edited through a view provided there is a reverse operation that constructs the original representation from the view. VinEd extends the notion of a view to any representation that can be obtained from the original program, e.g., program compilation, or version control functions. Thus VinEd can be extended to a complete programming environment.