General-purpose Programming Environment Research Articles

Visual Lisp/CLOS programming in OpenMusic

OpenMusic (OM) is a visual programming language developed on top of Common Lisp and CLOS, in which most of the functional and object-oriented programming concepts can be implemented and carried out graphically. Although this visual language was designed for musical applications, the focus in this paper is to describe and study OM as a complete general-purpose programming environment.

National Instruments LabVIEW: A Programming Environment for Laboratory Automation and Measurement

National Instruments LabVIEW is a graphical programming language that has its roots in automation control and data acquisition. Its graphical representation, similar to a process flow diagram, was created to provide an intuitive programming environment for scientists and engineers. The language has matured over the last 20 years to become a general purpose programming environment. LabVIEW has several key features which make it a good choice in an automation environment. These include simple network communication, turnkey implementation of common communication protocols (RS232, GPIB, etc.), powerful toolsets for process control and data fitting, fast and easy user interface construction, and an efficient code execution environment. We discuss the merits of the language and provide an example application suite written in-house which is used in integrating and controlling automation platforms.

Building layered active services

The NodeOS and execution environment (EE) layers of the active network architectural framework are designed to offer a general purpose programming environment to active applications (AAs). However, the architecture suffers from the lack of higher-level APIs and services that would simplify AA code and could be shared by multiple AAs. We propose a modified architecture that introduces an Application Environment (AE) layer above the EE layer to fill the gap. The AE layer offers higher-level services to simplified User-define Processing Modules (UPMs). Together they replace the conventional AA and offer a higher-level API to code to. This paper discusses the issues that arise when breaking the existing AA layer into two layers, and presents our experiences implementing a concast service using the new architecture. We also present performance numbers for our concast service (running on the ASP EE) that show the additional overhead incurred is acceptable.

Dielectrophoresis-based programmable fluidic processors.

Droplet-based programmable processors promise to offer solutions to a wide range of applications in which chemical and biological analysis and/or small-scale synthesis are required, suggesting they will become the microfluidic equivalents of microprocessors by offering off-the-shelf solutions for almost any fluid based analysis or small scale synthesis problem. A general purpose droplet processor should be able to manipulate droplets of different compositions (including those that are electrically conductive or insulating and those of polar or non-polar nature), to control reagent titrations accurately, and to remain free of contamination and carry over on its reaction surfaces. In this article we discuss the application of dielectrophoresis to droplet based processors and demonstrate that it can provide the means for accurately titrating, moving and mixing polar or non-polar droplets whether they are electrically conductive or not. DEP does not require contact with control surfaces and several strategies for minimizing surface contact are presented. As an example of a DEP actuated general purpose droplet processor, we show an embodiment based on a scaleable CMOS architecture that uses DEP manipulation on a 32 x 32 electrode array having built-in control and switching circuitry. Lastly, we demonstrate the concept of a general-purpose programming environment that facilitates droplet software development for any type of droplet processor.

A decision support system for rule discovery in social networks

Automatic rule discovery of membership in and relations between classes or categories, from given examples and counter-examples, is an important objective in many areas of computing. We have established a fairly general purpose programming environment for inductive rule discovery. It can be used, for example, as a high-level decision support system for social and cultural anthropologists. The program hypothesizes and then asserts rules that govern (permit or prohibit) social interactions and relations in human societies. We also describe the domain-independent facilities of the decision support system offered to the user and how the program works.

AN ABSTRACT, SHARED AND PERSISTENT DATA STRUCTURE FOR SUPPORTING DATABASE MANAGEMENT AND MULTILINGUAL NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Neither today’s general purpose programming environment nor high-level programming languages, including those designed for AI purposes, provide adequate support for database systems. Furthermore, non-English language databases are difficult to treat either in existing database systems or with current high-level languages, because they require culture-sensitive operations on multiple foreign character sets. In this paper, we present an abstract, shared and persistent data structure, called HL+, capable of supporting database management applications. We also describe the means for coping with the aforementioned problems by accessing HL+ features of database management from high-level programming languages with an extensible programmable high-level language interface. Extensions to the data structure to accommodate processing of multiple foreign character strings are also described, and examples of multilingual applications are given.

A transformational approach to generating application-specific environments

Current software development environments tend to lie at opposite ends of a spectrum: at one extreme are specialized application generators; at the other are general-purpose programming environments. The former provide strong support for system development and reuse, but are costly to build and available only for limited domains. The latter provide weak support, but are generally available and universally applicable. We describe a technique for automating the production of application-specific environments that lie between these two extremes. The key idea is that these environments can be derived from general-purpose programming environments by a process of structured transformation. We describe a tool for performing these transformations. It provides a set of formal operators for specializing a description of a general-purpose environment; as operators are applied, the system semi-automatically builds a set of transformation rules used to translate application-specific programs into those of the original general-purpose environment. The output of the tool is an application-specific environment together with a program transformer that provides execution semantics for programs written in that environment.