An empirical investigation of language-based editing paradigms

We have been concerned for some time with the lack of rigorous experimental evaluation of design options chosen for tools used by software engineers. In a series of studies of various evaluation techniques we conducted an empirical usability study of a design issue (choice of editing paradigm for language-based editors) that has reached a "subjective stalemate" in the research community. This usability study, although limited to some extent by sample size and user type, has shown little advantage to either tree-building or text-recognition and probably indicated that some hybrid of the two is most appropriate. KEYWORDS: usability study, languagebased editors. 1 INTRODUCTION Two basic paradigms for editing are commonly associated with language-based editors: treebuilding and text-recognition. Briefly, with the tree-building paradigm the user is only allowed operations that ensure the structural correctness of the program tree at all times. To extend a program the user selects a templa...