40 Years of Computing at Newcastle

Department Technical Report Series No. 549

Making Visual Languages More Effective.

C.M. Holt

University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1996

Abstract

The history of visual language development seems to be full of unfulfilled promise; good ideas are seldom taken up by the outside community because benefits are not perceived to outweigh costs. One reason for this has to do with a certain confusion about how best to take advantage of the flexibility that non-textual syntactic structures should provide. It is suggested that several canonical views of a program be available, reflecting people's various preferences for abbreviation. This is considered within the framework of a dataflow-based notation, but the general points raised should be applicable to other styles of visual language.

Department Technical Report Series - 1996
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Technical Report Abstract No. 549, 30 June 1997