Implementation of an automated documentation system with a visual data flow programming language

In this article, we present advantages and restrictions that visual data flow programming language (VDFL) brings to a measurement system implementation. These results have been collected together during the implementation of an automated documentation system. Because of the characteristic of VDFL, such as, absence of variables and concreteness of the program code representation the implementation suffers from lack of run-time program variability. In this article, we introduce a dynamic case structure that is a theoretical solution to improve the program variability during execution. The main advantages for using VDFL are prototyping with predefined program components and comprehensibility of the visual language. We also found that the rapid prototyping method combined together with a simple top-down design is a useful tool for a measurement system implementation.