Technical Report No. 20, March 1990 - Abstract

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The software animation system PASTIS (Program Animation System with Interactive Solutions) for program animation with emphasis on the visualization of the dynamic behavior of algorithms and data structures is presented. Its main properties are unmodified source code of the visualized program, concurrent multiple views on algorithms and data structures, and interactive alternations of views during run time. PASTIS is distinguished by high modularity and strict separation of its components. This makes it particularly suitable for distributed computing environments. The interface between program and animation is a relational data model. Animations visualize a single tuple, or sets of tuples, called relations, or sets of relations, called networks. Animations can be nested hierarchically. A prototype of PASTIS was implemented under Unix using the GNU source level debugger gbd and the X-window system.