Building interprocess communication models using STILE

The authors describe the STILE (Structure Interconnection Language and Environment) general-purpose computer-based graphical design and development system for describing logical relationships among components of systems. The syntax of the graphs produced using STILE is separate from the semantics, which are supplied by a postprocessor. A major advantage of this approach is the ability to address different models of computation, especially different concurrency models, using the same graphical environment. The authors show how to create primary building block parts for analog computing and data-flow computing from parts defined in a different model of computing. Composing parts in this fashion eliminates the need to build postprocessors for these additional models of computation, thereby overcoming one of the major problems introduced by separating graphical syntax from semantics.<>