1. Early Experience with the Visual Programmer's WorkBench.
- Author
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Rubin, Robert V., Walker II, James, and Golin, Eric J.
- Subjects
VISUAL programming (Computer science) ,VISUAL programming languages (Computer science) ,SOFTWARE engineering ,COMPUTER programming ,CONCURRENT engineering ,ENGINEERING ,COMPUTER algorithms ,ELECTRONIC data processing ,COMPUTER software - Abstract
Diagrams play a central role in software engineering. They are used for specifying design elements such as requirements, concurrent systems, database models and interactive systems. Families of diagrams form visual languages, and creating such diagrams constitutes visual programming. The Visual Programmer's WorkBench (VPW) addresses the rapid synthesis of programming environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. A language-based environment for a specific visual language is generated in VPW from a specification of the syntactic structure, the abstract structure, the static semantics and the dynamic semantics of the language. VPW is built around a model of distributed processing based on shared distributed memory. This framework is used both in defining the architecture of the environment and for the execution model of visual languages. The Visual Programmer's WorkBench has been used to experiment with visual programming environments for several visual languages. This paper describes the design of the Visual Programmer's WorkBench and our experience using it to generate a distributed programming environment for a concurrent visual language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 1990
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