Disign and Implementation of a System for Visual Programming

Abstract

The aim of the project of this paper is to design and implement a system for visual programming, based on data flow graphs. Data flow is applicative and based on transformations on data flowing through a graph. The system provides a user interface from which the graphs can be created in a fairly natural way, without enforcing any unnecessary restrictions on the user. The interface is attractive to look at, fairly straightforward to use and there is no restriction on the number of graphs or programs that may be created or edited at once. The data flow execution model adopted is a demand driven model, which runs directly from the internal representation of the data flow graphs. The system has been tested on several complex programs including factorial and Fibonacci sequence functions, and the Newton-Raphson method of approximating the roots of a function. A comparison has been made between the system described in this paper and other related systems. It has been shown that the system of this paper has many features over the compared systems.