Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!david From: david@geac.UUCP (David Haynes) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Design Methods and Flow charts (in a remote way) Message-ID: <3066@geac.UUCP> Date: 23 Jul 88 11:23:29 GMT Article-I.D.: geac.3066 References: <1440@bute.tcom.stc.co.uk> Reply-To: david@geac.UUCP (David Haynes) Organization: The Now Dead IU Project Lines: 43 In article <1440@bute.tcom.stc.co.uk> Ray Jones writes: > > Enough of that, anyone know about any good books on object orientated > design ? This, through a tangential leap of astronomic proportions, triggered off a thought which I was going to ask you folks about... In working through possible extensions to my design of a thing called Prism, I was struck by the fact that, while I was not proposing to have a 3GL as the main interface, I was not planning on having a 4GL either, or even an object oriented approach. (in my understanding of the term) A little history: Prism is a protocol-driven, windowed, forms system which works equally well for dumb ascii terminals as it does for, say, X11. The system employs the use of ``smart agents'' to isolate the presentational aspects from the computational aspects of the code, so that the application folk have minimal changes to go from, say, English to French. (or Hebrew or kanji Japanese). When thinking of what sort of language should be used to program this beastie, I was struck by the fact that the language really supports ``transitions'' via ``events''. That is to say, the processing is driven by (almost) random changes in the data. Perhaps, it is clearer to say that the system must handle changes to any of a set of data elements at any time... Where am I leading with all this? Well, the problem is that a dataflow system will not aid the user in the design of this type of system, a flow chart is useless, and the state transition diagram for this would quickly be unweildly (think of a spreadsheet as a form in this system). In some object-oriented systems, this sort of triggered action would be assigned to ``methods'', but I don't think that is a really viable analysis of what is going on here. Your thoughts? -david-