Animation of Object-Oriented Program Execution
Peter Boothe and Sandro Badame

Proceedings of Bridges 2011: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture
Pages 585–588
Short Papers

Abstract

We describe a new system which animates the changing call stack and object-reference graph of an object-oriented program that has not (necessarily) been designed to be visualized. We have sought to make the drawings and animations produced by our system be beautiful in an effort to show non-programmers what beauty and elegance might mean in the context of source code. Our animation system uses a new graph layout algorithm which produces high-quality layouts in which many data structures naturally ``look right''.

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