Towards a Formal Specification of the GKS Output Primitives

Abstract

The literature contains a number of papers which look at the application of formal specification techniques to the specification of computer graphics systems [3,5,6,7,8,10,14]. A landmark in computer graphics was reached on 15 August 1985, with the publication of the Graphical Kernel System (GKS) as the first ISO standard for computer graphics programming [13]. This paper extends some of the ideas for defining graphics data types contained in [3] and [14] and applies them to GKS. Of particular interest, is a more formal definition of the geometry of the GKS output primitives than that given in the GKS document.