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From: lance@motcsd.csd.mot.com (lance.norskog)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: OOP diagrams, visual semantics
Message-ID: <1859@greek.csd.mot.com>
Date: 16 Oct 90 17:32:54 GMT
References: <34723@cup.portal.com> <eahX02Ryd1UX01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Distribution: na
Organization: Motorola CSD, Cupertino CA
Lines: 15

In article <34723@cup.portal.com> spage@cup.portal.com (S spage Page) writes:
>I'm documenting an object-oriented system with lots of objects.  I need to
>come up with pictures showing class inheritance, instances of classes, [...]

>Yikes!  There's a lot of semantic information to get across.  Clearly you
>can't communicate everything about a system in a single diagram. [...]

My take on this is that you want to be visual from the beginning, and
design a programming system where you push pictures around.  A full listing
then becomes all the pictures, where you can only see some of them on
the screen.  This is called Visual Programming.

Trying to take an existing textual system and build a picture displaying
its cross-referentiality (Program Visualization) is doomed from the
start.