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Powerful editing systems for developing complex software documents are difficult to engineer. Besides requiring efficient incremental algorithms and complex data structures, such editors must accommodate flexible editing styles, provide a consistent, coherent, and powerful user interface, support individual variations and projectwide configurations, maintain a sharable database of information concerning the documents being edited, and integrate smoothly with the other tools in the environment. Pan is a language-based editing and browsing system that exhibits these characteristics. This paper surveys the design and engineering of Pan , paying particular attention to a number of issues that pervade the system: incremental checking and analysis, information retention in the presence of change, tolerance for errors and anomalies, and extension facilities.
Ballance et al. (Thu,) studied this question.