Visual real-time programming language

Software engineering for real-time applications is known to be a hard problem. For years, many people have been taking different steps to tackle this problem. One of these steps was the introduction of visual languages. Visual languages have the potential to ease programming as they are more expressive than the conventional textual languages (Shu, 1988). In the domain of real-time applications, the use of visual languages is mainly restricted to software design languages. Automatic code generators are used to generate a code skeleton, which is filled in with fairly `coarse grained' hand written textual program fragments. In this paper a method is presented to extend existing visual design languages to visual programming languages with a much more powerful visual component.