by [Theo Verelst], but feel free to add of course (lots of links could be add, for sure).
This page will not contain a script or [bwise] graph even starting to do what
the title suggest for time to come, I'm sure, unless somebody feels called to
do a job... The idea, which is important enough to even make more than one
page about for mathematically shaded reasons, is that bwise blocks could
replace every procedure and command in the script which implements bwise.
Clearly, the advantage would be a visual langauage rendered in it's own visual
programming blocks, which is a strong idea, good for insight, portability and
theoretical reasons.
Is that possible ? Well, in principle every procedure to begin with can even
automatically be rendered as a bwise block with inputs corresponding to the formalprocedure arguments. However using globals or `[uplevel]` spoils the general
applicability of this idea to any tTcl program containing procedures.
A script can be rendered as a row of sequential blocks standing for separate
or grouped tcl commands. That leaves the problem of feeding the global
state to all those blocks, and the output of functional blocks (if they are that)
back to the global state. Just like the state and behaviour of for instance
[fileevent] and [bind] are hard to model exactly as bwise blocks.
Loops and control structures are possible, but for efficiency sake it may be very
desirable to digress from strict functional analysis there, and include some sort
of trigger mechanism like has been present but not often used yet in bwise.
Is there a major point to this? Certainly, programming with blocks is like making
circuit diagrams, which is possibly a very succesfull design method, see the normal
habits of electrical engineers which on average design and make work circuits and
systems with incredibly higher complexity than most software engineers ever would attempt.
also it is a clear way to communicate programmatic ideas, and can more easily becompared with theoretical programming issues like [CSP] and CCS and to the
field of distributed (parallel) programming in practice.
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