The transition of context-free textual languages into a visual programming notation via graph techniques and a meta tool

The design and implementation of a new visual programming language is a difficult task. The article presents a new meta tool which eases the initial design phase. The approach differs from existing techniques as it is based on an easy-to-use description language, each lexeme of which is represented as an individual node on the workplace and is described by a special code file. The broad aim of this research is to investigate how visual elements/techniques could be integrated into a concrete visual environment which supports the programming task. Thus, the emphasis lies primarily on the visualisation of structures or relationships rather than on implementation details. To keep the ongoing research as open as possible, the separation of the underlying semantics from the visual representation is of great importance.