For those familiar with .Net and WWF (Windows Workflow
Foundation) will understand the concept of visual scripting. For
others, the idea is actually very simple, and it's one of those
amazing ideas that you wonder why no-one thought of it earlier.
Perhaps they did, but the user interface was not there, but I can't
see that myself.
The idea is that any code construct can be represented by a visual
object. from there you can add other constructs inside it, after it or
before it. You can have decision constructs that have two or more
possible exits, from each of which you can, of course, add more
constructs.
In this way you can visually write code.
The basic premise is that there are a limited number of code
constructs, and this is very true of all procedural languages. There
are only really three: Sequence (Do B then C), Selection (if
condition A is true, Do B, otherwise skip B) and Iteration (keep
doing A until condition B). Since Iteration is a specialised form of
Selection, there are in fact only two. Obviously more make it
simpler to do our day-to-day development, or we'd all be doing it in
binary, but you can see that there are distinct limits in what is
possible in code. Accordingly, there is no good reason not top
display these constructs graphically.
In version 9 you will be able to build .net code using these same
constructs.
1. Introduction
