Impulse-86: a substrate for object-oriented interface design
Smith, Reid G.; Dinitz, Rich; and Barth, Paul
View document:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/960112.28714
Abstract
Impulse-86 provides a general and extensible substrate upon which to construct a wide variety of interactive user interfaces for developing, maintaining, and using knowledge-based systems. The system is based on five major building blocks: Editor, Editor Window, PropertyDisplay, Menu, and Operations. These building blocks are interconnected via a uniform framework and each has a well-defined set of responsibilities in an interface.
Customized interfaces can be designed by declaratively replacing some of the building blocks in existing Impulse-86 templates. Customization may involve a wide range of activities, ranging from simple override of default values or methods that control primitive operations (e.g., font selection), to override of more central Impulse-86 methods (e.g., template instantiation). Most customized interfaces require some code to be written—to handle domain-specific commands. However, in all cases, the Impulse-86 substrate provides considerable leverage by taking care of the low-level details of screen, mouse, and keyboard manipulation.
Impulse-86 is implemented in Strobe, a language that provides object-oriented programming support for Lisp. This simplifies customization and extension.
Journal: ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Volume: 21 Issue: 11 Pages: 167-176