Task 2 : Visual Programming

The determinate event of this half year was the kick-oo meeting in April helded at UoW. The 3 days meeting involved general sessions and special workroup sections. Among the decisions the plenum made here are the essentials for our group: 1. The software environment does not target any speciic hardware (like Transputer). It supports the PVM model (some hints concerning the new MPI standard was also given). 2. The target language is ANSI C. 3. The software environment uses the UNIX operating environment, the X-Window System (X11R5) features, the XLIB, XToolkit, Motif libraries and as a native language the C or optionally the C++ languages. For the sake of the highest portability the GNU C or C++ compiler is used. 4. The information dissemination tools: mainly e-mail and Internet connections. Formats: for text LaTeX, Postscript, DOC; for graphics XXg are used. During the section discussions it was turned out, that the contributors had similar ideas concerning the graphical design tool to develop. However, there were substantial diierencies also: The UAB proposed the pure process-graph approximation referring the success of the PSEE tool developed in UAB. The UoW proposed the template-based method already studied by group members since years. They argued with advantages of the program-correctness ooered by this model, e.g. programs developed by this model are deadlock-free. The KFKI-MSZKI proposed to involve object oriented avour into the model. This is a natural need arising not only from the request of the program reusability, but ts conveniently to the distributed model and to the graphical design tools. Finally the discussion of this group converged and led to a conclusion: The developing of the parallel graphical design is splitted into two steps: 9