Article

The semantics of graphical languages

Authors:

Stephan Ellner,

Walid TahaAuthors Info & Claims

PEPM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation

Pages 122 - 133

https://doi.org/10.1145/1244381.1244402

Published: 15 January 2007 Publication History

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.

References

[1]

Robin Abraham and Martin Erwig. Header and unit inference for spreadsheets through spatial analyses. In IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 165--172, 2004.

Digital Library

[2]

Zena M. Ariola and Stefan Blom. Cyclic lambda calculi. In Martín Abadi and Takayasu Ito, editors, Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software, Third International Symposium, TACS '97, Sendai, Japan, volume 1281 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 77--106. Springer, 1997.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Burnett, J. Atwood, R. Walpole Djang, H. Gottfried, J. Reichwein, and S. Yang. Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm. Journal of Functional Programming, 11:155--206, March 2001.

Digital Library

[4]

W. Citrin, M. Doherty, and B. Zorn. Formal semantics of control in a completely visual programming language. In Allen L. Ambler and Takayuki Dan Kimura, editors, Proceedings of the Symposium on Visual Languages, pages 208--215, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, October 1994. IEEE Computer Society Press.

[5]

W. Citrin, R. Hall, and B. Zorn. Programming with visual expressions. In Volker Haarslev, editor, Proc. 11th IEEE Int. Symp. Visual Languages, pages 294--301. IEEE Computer Society Press, 5--9 September 1995.

Digital Library

[6]

T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, and R. L. Rivest. Introduction to algorithms. MIT Press and McGraw-Hill Book Company, 14th edition, 1994.

Digital Library

[7]

Stephan Ellner. Preview: An untyped graphical calculus for resource-aware programming. Master's thesis, Rice University, 2004.

[8]

Stephan Ellner and Walid Taha. The semantics of graphical languages. 2006. Available in Informal Proceedings of DCC {20}.

[9]

M. Erwig. Abstract syntax and semantics of visual languages. Jounral of Visual Languages and Computing, 9:461--483, October 1998.

[10]

Martin Erwig and Margaret M. Burnett. Adding apples and oranges. In 4th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, pages 173--191, 2002.

Digital Library

[11]

Martin Erwig and Bernd Meyer. Heterogeneous visual languages-integrating visual and textual programming. In Visual Languages, VL, pages 318--325, 1995.

Digital Library

[12]

National Instruments. LabVIEW Student Edition 6i. Prentice Hall, 2001.

[13]

S. Peyton Jones, A. Blackwell, and M. Burnett. A user-centred approach to functions in Excel. ICFP, pages 165--176, 2003.

Digital Library

[14]

Edward A. Lee. What's ahead for embedded software? IEEE Computer, pages 18--26, September 2000.

Digital Library

[15]

MetaOCaml: A compiled, type-safe multi-stage programming language. Available online from http://www.metaocaml.org/, 2004.

[16]

National Instruments. LabVIEW. Online at http://www.ni.com/labview.

[17]

Oregon Graduate Institute Technical Reports. P.O. Box 91000, Portland, OR 97291--1000, USA. Available online from ftp://cse.ogi.edu/pub/tech-reports/README.html.

[18]

Jan Rekers and Andy Schuerr. Defining and parsing visual languages with layered graph grammars. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 8(1):27--55, 1997.

[19]

Amr Sabry. The Formal Relationship between Direct and Continuation-Passing Style Optimizing Compilers: A Synthesis of Two Paradigms. PhD thesis, Rice University, August 1994.

Digital Library

[20]

Mary Sheeran and Tom Melham, editors. Sixth International Workshop on Designing Correct Circuits: Vienna, 25--26 March 2006: Participants' Proceedings. ETAPS 2006, March 2006. A Satellite Event of the ETAPS 2006 group of conferences.

[21]

Walid Taha. Multi-Stage Programming: Its Theory and Applications. PhD thesis, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, 1999. Available from {17}.

Digital Library

[22]

Walid Taha and Michael Florentin Nielsen. Environment classifiers. In The Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '03), New Orleans, 2003.

Digital Library

[23]

The MathWorks. Simulink. Online at http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink.

[24]

Uccello: A model for supporting higher-order, generative programming in visual languages. Available online from http://www.resource-aware.org/twiki/pub/RAP/WebHome/final-small.png, 2006.

[25]

Da-Qian Zhang, Kang Zhang, and Jiannong Cao. A context-sensitive graph grammar formalism for the specification of visual languages. The Computer Journal, 44(3): 186--200, 2001.

Cited By

Hölldobler KRumpe BWortmann A(2018)Software language engineering in the largeComputer Languages, Systems and Structures10.1016/j.cl.2018.08.00254:C(386-405)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cl.2018.08.002
Hölldobler KRoth ARumpe BWortmann A(2017)Advances in Modeling Language EngineeringModel and Data Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-66854-3_1(3-17)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66854-3_1
Clerici SZoltan CPorto ALópez-Fraguas F(2009)A dynamically customizable process-centered evaluation modelProceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming10.1145/1599410.1599416(37-48)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1599410.1599416
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The semantics of graphical languages
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
    2. Formal language definitions
      1. Semantics
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program semantics

Recommendations

Semantics of subset-logic languages
Semantics for graphical user interfaces
TLDI '12: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Types in language design and implementation

Graphical user interface (GUI) libraries are one of the most widely-encountered higher-order interfaces. Even in languages (such as Java and C++) where programmers customarily avoid higher-order abstractions, the GUI toolkit interface is invariably ...
Coinductive big-step operational semantics for type soundness of Java-like languages
FTfJP '11: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-Like Programs

We define a coinductive semantics for a simple Java-like language by simply interpreting coinductively the rules of a standard big-step operational semantics.

We prove that such a semantics is sound w.r.t. the usual small-step operational semantics, and ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PEPM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation

January 2007

180 pages

ISBN:9781595936202

DOI:10.1145/1244381

Conference Chairs:
G. Ramalingam,
Eelco Visser

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 January 2007

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

PEPM07

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

PEPM07: Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

January 15 - 16, 2007

Nice, France

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 120 submissions, 55%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
355
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hölldobler KRumpe BWortmann A(2018)Software language engineering in the largeComputer Languages, Systems and Structures10.1016/j.cl.2018.08.00254:C(386-405)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cl.2018.08.002
Hölldobler KRoth ARumpe BWortmann A(2017)Advances in Modeling Language EngineeringModel and Data Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-66854-3_1(3-17)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66854-3_1
Clerici SZoltan CPorto ALópez-Fraguas F(2009)A dynamically customizable process-centered evaluation modelProceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming10.1145/1599410.1599416(37-48)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1599410.1599416
Taha W(2008)Plenary talk III Domain-specific languages2008 International Conference on Computer Engineering & Systems10.1109/ICCES.2008.4772953(xxiii-xxviii)Online publication date: Nov-2008
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCES.2008.4772953

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten