The idea of using a grammar to create a user interface goes back at least as far as Engelbart's AHI group. They used a distant past cousin of OMeta (called Tree Meta) to do this. Ca. 1966.
One of the first systems to specify and make graphical grammars (and UIs) via user interactions was William Newman's "The Reaction Handler" PhD thesis about the same time. (William is the Newman of "Newman and Sproull"). It's worthwhile to contemplate that a state machine (recursive or not) is the opposite of "modeless" -- it is the epitome of modes. So this is not a great way to specify a really nice modeless interface (because you have to draw arrows outward from pretty much every state to pretty much every other state). "Modeless" at PARC meant "you don't have to explicitly back out of your current 'mode' to initiate any other command". Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Benoît Fleury <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, July 23, 2011 11:05:49 PM Subject: [fonc] HotDraw's Tool State Machine Editor Hi, I found HotDraw's tool state machine editor [1] very interesting as a graphical editor for a "syntax-directed translator". The state machine transforms a stream of mouse events into a stream of commands on the structured drawing. Did I push the analogy too far? I was wondering if anyone knows similar examples of graphical editor for grammars? Moreover, we didn't find (yet) a good metaphor for writing programs in general purpose programming language in a graphical editor. Do you think that might change with "domain specific languages"? Thank you to everyone on this list for the very interesting discussions and links. - Benoit [1] http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/brant/HotDraw/Conversion.html> _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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