On Sun, 2006-08-13 at 22:53 +0100, alex wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-08-13 at 10:52 +0100, dave wrote:
> > diagrammatic languages == text based languages
> >
> > for instance, uml is a system for writing C++ (among other things) via
> > various diagrams and outputs compilable C++, these diagrams can be
> > generated from existing source code - they just represent a different
> > view on the same thing
>
> Yep but UML diagrams contain text, and AFAIK while you can generate
> stubs and move things around you can't transform a whole C++ program
> into UML and back again.
A lot of large scale software development is done wholly in UML, which
is then converted to C++ and built. I've never used it myself, but it is
reported to make the process of planning and detecting errors on a high
level system much easier, more so than text, which lends itself to
thinking about the details, rather than the interaction between the
parts of a system.
In these sorts of development, the only hand written code is for jobs
like the low level drivers that communicate with the outside world.
> Programs written in textual languages can sometimes look like little
> diagrams, particularly in the programmer's use of whitespace (whether
> the whitespace is ignored by the lexer or not). We're laying out groups
> of symbols in meaningful ways.
>
> However there is something special about languages rich enough to allow
> such things as introspection, self-description and so on.
There is no reason that this can't be done with a diagramatic language
as far as I am aware. For example, I've been playing around with a
script that converts lispy languages into dot graphs, it's not working
properly yet, but here is the graph representation of the program
itself:
http://www.pawfal.org/dave/images/dotty.png
I just wanted to know what they looked like, but there is no reason you
couldn't write an editor that allowed you to build programs like this.
cheers,
dave
Received on Mon Aug 14 2006 - 08:22:10 BST
