The iconic interface for the PIctorial C language

Iconic environments intend to provide expressive tools to implement, to debug and to execute programs. Moreover its pictorial constructs guide the user to design algorithms in an interactive fashion. Visual interfaces are especially required whenever programs run on an heterogeneous and reconfigurable multiprocessor system oriented to image analysis. Pictorial tools help the user to control the scope of variables, and the distribution of the tasks into the processors. In this paper, the general design, the visual-syntax, and the implementation of the first prototype of an iconic user interface for the PIctorial C Language (PICL) are described