Controlled dataflow visual programming languages
Philip T. Cox, Simon Gauvin · 2011
In an important subclass of visual dataflow languages that includes many developed for industrial use, programs consist of acyclic diagrams embedded in control structures of some form. We present here a formalisation of this class of languages, which we call Controlled Dataflow. This work was motivated by a previous study of an exceptions mechanism for visual languages of this type, since to define how the exceptions mechanism could be incorporated into any CDL, we needed a formalism to precisely capture the syntax and semantics of this class, including a protocol for including language-specific control structures. To illustrate the formalism, we provide an example that shows how it captures conditional execution and iteration. We also report on use of this formalism as the basis for an implementation of new CDL language tools.