Lead Developers: TBD

Array programming as provided by languages such as APL, J, or SaC allows for a high level of abstraction. Most operations of these languages are applicable to arrays of arbitrary rank (number of axes) and arbitrary shape (extends wrt. individual axes). This generality of operators combined with the linearised form of traditional programming style creates difficulties for novice array programmers as not only values of expressions but their shapes as well have to be kept in mind. A graphical programming tool for displaying arrays and for composing simple non-recursive array operations would help overcoming this problem as the shapes and the content of arbitrary intermediate expressions could be visualised.

The idea of this project is to display individual arrays in separate windows in a spreadsheet-style manner. These windows should be linked by means of functional array expressions that define how one window's content is computed from one or several other window's contents. The graphical user interface preferably is created as a Java applet (see java.sun.com for details and tutorials) as this eases portability. While the graphical parts of this tool have to be created from scratch, the underlying array programming machinery can directly make use of one of the existing array programming languages. The compiled array programming language SaC due to its side-effect free core language as well as its C interface seems to be particularly suitable for this task.

Current Status: Nothing done yet