Leaving the visual language ghetto

Visual languages (VLs)-invented outside the visual programming language (VPL) community-are quite successfully used around the world. There are, for example, international VL standards used in the telecommunication, software engineering and automatic control engineering industries, but alas, most of these language standards were defined without knowing the VL definition and design principles developed by the VPL community. This paper suggests a procedure for employing our knowledge about VLs to develop incremental improvements for widely accepted visual modeling/programming language standards. It starts with a survey of component-based VLs and ends with some proposals about how to to incorporate modeling-in-the-large concepts into the IEC-1131 standard for function block languages