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Show graphic or visual manner. "Program animation' allows one to tak a graphi al representation of a program and dynamicly step through its ex cution. This th si does not deal with "program visualization" or "program animation." It d als only with visual programming as it applies to the graphical construction and manipulation of block diagrams. As such we have been able to concentrate on developing methods for managing some of the problems and difficulties associat d with visual programming, i.e., visual clutter. Further information on the trends and techniques of visual programming may be obtained through the survey articles [24,27 ,29]. 1.1 Benefits of Visual Programming Programming in the traditional one-dimensional manner has the tendency to lead to what has been termed "analysis paralysis." Where "the means become the ends as you forget what you wanted to get out of the computer and become wrapped up in the process of getting it out" [3]. Programming using visual expressions offers to eliminate this by supporting a more user-friendly "convenient and natural" interface. This higher-level approach promises to increase programmer productivity and program reliability. The idea of using a graphical, or visual, paradigm to programming is not new. Flowcharts, state diagrams, petri nets, and data flow diagrams have long been used to convey particular aspects of control-flow, data-flow and program structure. This renewed interest in visual programming has come about, in part, because of the following reasons: • The human mind is strongly visually oriented. Our ability to process information is directly affected by the format in which that information is presented. People tend to relate easily to graphical representations because they acquire information at a significantly higher rate by discovering graphical relationships |
