The design and implementation of a Pascal program browser

In the life of a useful program, it will be read many times by its author, or by other programmers for maintenance or enhancement purposes. Thus, program reading is a frequent task done by a programmer, either reading it from the source listing or directly from a terminal. Commonly, reading a program is done using a text editor. The text editor is built for developing programs, so its use for reading programs is very unnatural and cumbersome. This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a tool to make program reading more convenient and thus more productive. To overcome the inherent problem of the small size of CRT screens as compared with the large size of most programs, holophrasting technique is used. The user can also control the compression or expansion of certain portions of the input program. The tool is language sensitive and is for the Pascal programming language.