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Popup Menus

As a structure editor, SpotCheck offers some unique advantages for anyone not familiar with all the features of Java, whether they are a novice programmer, an experienced programmer new to Java, or a Java programmer using a rarely-needed feature.

One of these advantages is the popup menu available at any placeholder. In the example below, the user has clicked on the small triangle to the right of the $stmts$ placeholder. This brings up a popup menu showing all the legal replacements for that placeholder.

popup menu screen shot

When the user selects "for (...;...;...) {...}" from the popup menu, the $stmts$ placeholder is replaced with a for statement with four new placeholders.

for statement screen shot

Obviously, SpotCheck will never allow the user to introduce a syntax error when the popup menus are used -- illegal options don't appear in the menus. In a future release, SpotCheck will be similarly proactive in preventing certain kinds of semantic errors. For example, where a boolean expression is required, the menu will not show the names of variables declared as ints.

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