Re: Graphical Depiction of Parse Trees

> I, however, want to browse this tree. I can print it out; in fact
> that is exactly what I am doing presently, but am looking for a
> better solution. In particular, I was wondering if I could generate
> the tree in some special format as input to some sort of program
> that draws the tree onto the screen (whose nodes can be expanded and
> collapsed with the click of a mouse button perhaps). The crux of the
> matter is "hierachical visualization for a hierarchical
> datatype". Any ideas ???


Someone, I don't know who, called this "holophrasm" [sp?]. If you can
get your hands on a copy of Mike Caplinger's dissertation (Rice U,
1987, give or take a year) it might help you some there. We were all
working on a Fortran programming environment back then, that did
display ASTs (with less and less emphasis on the "A" over time) in a
hierarchical and allegedly acceptable form. Editing them is a bigger
problem, since (as others have observed) most programs undergoing
modification spend most of their time not in a
syntactically/semantically "correct" form. There's later work done
(at Rice) on this by Don Baker (graduate student) and Scott Warren
(adjunct prof, I think also advisor to Don Baker). I'm sure other
people have worked on this problem; these are just the ones that I
happen to know.


David Chase
chase@naturalbridge.com

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