A Graphical Workstation and Programming Environment for Data-Driven Computation

Abstract: This dissertation reports on the development of a prototype programming environment for a graphical programming language to support a data-driven style of computation. Emphasis is on the need for tools to assist in the development of nontrivial graphical programs. Within the scope of programming languages there has been a lot of criticism that the current languages force an unnatural form for solutions, which is difficult to read, and even harder to verify, debug, maintain, and modify. One of the major "culprits" for all of these problems is felt to be side effects; thus there have been several proposals to create functional languages. One class of functional solutions which has received an increasing amount of interest is the area of data flow languages. In order to evaluate these alternate programming methodologies nontrivial programs need to be developed using such a methodology. This work grew out of an interest in providing a programming environment to support the development of very large programs in GPL and to find out what aspects of a programming environment would be substantially different for a graphical language which employs a data-driven computational model.