  The STAPLE project investigated (at the end of the eighties), a persistent
architecture for functional programming. Work has been done in two directions:
the development of a programming environment for a functional language within a
persistent system and an experiment on transferring the expertise of functional
prototyping into industry. This paper is a report on the first activity. The
first section gives a general description of Absynte - the abstract syntax tree
editor developed within the Project. Following sections make an attempt at
measuring the effectiveness of such an editor and discuss the problems raised
by structured syntax editing - specially environments based on abstract syntax
trees.
