Formal semantics of control in a completely visual programming language

Abstract

Visual representations of programs can facilitate program understanding by presenting aspects of programs using explicit and intuitive representations. To explore this idea, we have designed a completely visual static and dynamic presentation of an imperative programming language. Because our representation of control is completely visual, programmers of this language can understand the static and dynamic semantics of programs using the same framework. In this paper, we describe the semantics of our language, both informally and formally, focusing on support for control constructs. We also prove that using our language to model common high-level constructs is semantically sound.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>