Making Visual Languages More Effective

摘要

The history of visual language development seems to be full of unfulfilledpromise; 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. (Copyright (c) 1996 University of Newcastle upon Tyne.)