The semantics of graphical languages

@inproceedings{citeulike:1873678, abstract = {Visual notations are pervasive in circuit design, control systems, and increasingly in mainstream programming environments. Yet many of the foundational advances in programming language theory are taking place in the context of textual notations. In order to map such advances to the graphical world, and to take the concerns of the graphical world into account when working with textual formalisms, there is a need for rigorous connections between textual and graphical expressions of computation. To this end, this paper presents a graphical calculus called Uccello. Our key insight is that Ariola and Blom's work on sharing in the cyclic lambda calculus provides an excellent foundation for formalizing the semantics of graphical languages. As an example of what can be done with this foundation, we use it to extend a graphical language with staging constructs. In doing so, we provide the first formal account of sharing in a multi-stage calculus.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Ellner, Stephan and Taha, Walid }, booktitle = {PEPM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation}, citeulike-article-id = {1873678}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1244381.1244402}, isbn = {9781595936202}, keywords = {graphicalsyntax, languagedesign, proglangtheory}, pages = {122--133}, posted-at = {2007-11-06 12:11:05}, priority = {2}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {The semantics of graphical languages}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1244381.1244402}, year = {2007} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:1873678 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1873678 TI - The semantics of graphical languages T2 - PEPM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation SP - 122 EP - 133 AD - New York, NY, USA PB - ACM SN - 9781595936202 N2 - Visual notations are pervasive in circuit design, control systems, and increasingly in mainstream programming environments. Yet many of the foundational advances in programming language theory are taking place in the context of textual notations. In order to map such advances to the graphical world, and to take the concerns of the graphical world into account when working with textual formalisms, there is a need for rigorous connections between textual and graphical expressions of computation. To this end, this paper presents a graphical calculus called Uccello. Our key insight is that Ariola and Blom's work on sharing in the cyclic lambda calculus provides an excellent foundation for formalizing the semantics of graphical languages. As an example of what can be done with this foundation, we use it to extend a graphical language with staging constructs. In doing so, we provide the first formal account of sharing in a multi-stage calculus. KW - graphicalsyntax KW - languagedesign KW - proglangtheory AU - Ellner, Stephan AU - Taha, Walid PY - 2007/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1244381.1244402 ER -