Full Metal Jacket: A Pure Visual Dataflow Language Built on Top of Lisp

Full Metal Jacket is a general-purpose visual dataflow language currently being developed on top of Emblem, a Lisp dialect strongly influenced by Common Lisp but smaller and more type-aware, and with support for CLOS-style object orientation, graphics, event handling and multi-threading. Methods in Full Metal Jacket Jacket are directed acyclic graphs. Data arriving at ingates from the calling method flows along edges through vertices, at which it gets transformed by applying Emblem functions or methods, or methods defined in Full Metal Jacket, before it finally arrives at outgates where it is propagated back upwards to the calling method. The principal difference between Full Metal Jacket and existing visual dataflow languages such as Prograph is that Full Metal Jacket is a pure dataflow language, with no special syntax being required for control constructs such as loops or conditionals, which resemble ordinary methods except in the number of times they generate outputs. This uniform syntax means that, like Lisp and Prolog, methods in Full Metal Jacket are themselves data structures and can be manipulated as such.