Lava – An Object-Oriented RAD Language Designed for Ease of Learning, Use, and Program Comprehension

The growing demand for new software calls for a considerable acceleration of the software production process and for a sensible relaxation at the software maintenance front. These goals can be achieved only if we can decisively increase the degree of modularity, variability, comprehensibility of software, or short: the degree of structured programming, as well as the simplicity of program manipulation, restructuring, and transformation. The experimental object-oriented language “Lava” and the associated programming environment “LavaPE” attempt to achieve these goals by providing quite a number of unusual features. The most remarkable features are: 1. Text editors are completely replaced with Lava-specific structure editors. 2. A Lava class consists of a public “interface” and a completely separate, exchangeable “implementation” which may be stored in a different file. 3. Frameworks and design patterns are supported in a very natural way by allowing packages and interfaces to have overridable type parameters.