Liberating programming from the ASCII view

We present the xbVLISP programming environment currently under development in our laboratory which integrates textual, graphical and analogical representations of programs. This environment should be of help during the development of programs (including the handling of unfinished and/or erroneous programs), the observation of their execution (through the capacity of animating the various representations), their documentation and annotation (giving the user and the tools the possibility to enrich the representation of the program with textual or graphical comments, which then may be used by other tools), the explorative reading of programs and their maintenance (through such tools as integrated outstanding task lists, animating execution between two points of the program or displaying visual representations of selected characteristics).