Visual Languages

Lyle Burkhead (LYBRHED@delphi.com)
Tue, 12 Nov 1996 03:46:25 -0500 (EST)


This is an active area of research. IEEE sponsors a symposium on
Visual Languages each year. I have the proceedings of the 1993
meeting. It's a 400 page book with more than 50 articles; here are a
few sample topics:

Animation of algorithms
Fractal approaches for visualizing huge hierarchies
Interacting visual abstractions of programs
Graphical front ends for visual languages
Generating Smalltalk code from graphical operations and rules
Metatools for language translation

IEEE also sponsors an annual meeting on visualization, distinct
from the above. I went to the first one, called Visualization 90,
six years ago. Some sample topics from that meeting:

Visualizing computer memory architectures
Wide-band relativistic Doppler effect visualization
Techniques for visualizing Fermat's Last Theorem
Volume visualization in cell biology
A journey into the fourth dimension
Human perception and visualization

Anyone who wants to pursue this subject should join IEEE and go to
these conferences.

Lyle