The other object in PIPS that allows parameterization is called a property . Properties are used for various purposes: adding some information or selecting a style in a prettyprinter , asking to compute some statistics, selecting a special feature, etc.
The user interfaces can be used to modify the current properties and
if a local properties.rc exists, the last one modifies the
properties defined in the main PIPS properties.rc file.
Figure 7: Excerpt of the PIPS abstract syntax tree.
Note that since the PIPS behavior can be highly altered by the
properties , the properties used at the time of a workspace
creation is stored in the workspace itself to be sure to always use
the same properties along the life of a workspace . In such a way,
even if the main or local properties.rc is modified, the PIPS
behavior is coherent with the information persistence through
different runs.