Generation and evaluation of glyphs representing superclass-subclass relationships

This paper proposes and evaluates glyph representation of inheritance relationships between a superclass and subclasses in an object-oriented programming language. The inheritance relationships in object-oriented programming languages are usually represented by a diagram of a tree graph or a nested structure in a visual programming environment. Using the proposed representation, the inheritance relationships are represented by inclusion relationships of glyphs. A prototype system of glyph generation is developed. Experiments using the Java 2 Standard Edition, which has more than 1,500 classes, show that one can recognize inheritance relationships in the proposed representation faster than the usual textual representation.