Formal semantics of visual occam

Abstract

Visual programming languages (VPLs) have been proposed to simplify the task of programming and to make better use of human capabilities. Visual Occam (VISO) is a visual programming language for concurrent programming. It uses message passing for interprocess communication and processes are disjoint. The VISO language uses a modular approach to visual programming which simplifies the specification of programs. It has a graphical syntax based the language occam. The main emphasis in this paper is to provide formal semantics of VISO using process calculus. The semantics of all programming constructs and icons in VISO are given as well as a number of complete example programs and their translation in process calculus.