Incremental compilation in Magpie

Abstract

Magpie is an interactive, integrate programming environment that supports the development of Pascal programs a powerful, single-user workstation. Incremental compilation techniques are used to provide quick feedback on static errors and to ensure that a program is always ready for execution even while it is being edited. Magpie performs syntax and static semantic analysis with the unit of incrementality of a single character. Magpie uses incremental compilation to achieve performance levels that allow Pascal to be used interactively and as its own debugging language.