Visual Programming Languages – Snapshots
If you think of a programming language as a set of tokens and production rules (a grammar), then can't every programming language have infinitely-many visual representations, including "pure text," "blocks/pipes" and "Jacob's Representation"?<p>Does it make sense to call a programming <i>language</i> "visual"?<p>What if I represent a C program by a sequence of smells... The translator device reads the text from start to end, converts it to a token sequence, and emits a different smell for each token. Does that mean C is a "smell-based programming language"?<p>If the tokens get read by a text-to-speech program, does that make C an "audio programming language"?<p>What about a different <i>visual</i> way to represent C programs (besides the usual text way)? Maybe we replace each token with a colored block, where each token has its own color.<p>Can't we dispense with the notion of a "visual programming language"? There are programming languages, and for each language, there are many ways to represent its programs.