The class window

The class window is very similar to the variable window, and uses much of the same code. It displays a graphical representation of the classes in the program, and the inheritance relationships between them. These relationships form a directed acyclic graph. I decided that the most useful way to display this graph would be with the base classes, that don't inherit members from any other class, at the top, and every class to be shown with its parents above it in the picture (see Figure 4.7). This means that the user first sees the most basic data structures (which are presumably the easiest to understand) and then sees more complicated data structures built from the previous ones. The picture that is created in this way is a static picture that the user cannot change, apart from scrolling over it, because there is no simple way to reduce areas of the graph to a single icon.

Figure 4.7: The class window

As in the variable window, the user can click on an icon to call up a list on the right hand side--in this case, a list of the members of the selected class. The user can also choose to include in the list all of the members from the parent classes, so the user can choose either to see all of the members of a class or just the members that are different from its parents.