Aviva Directory » Computers & Internet » Programming » Prograph

Designed at Acadia University in the early 1980s, Prograph is an object-oriented, multi-paradigm programming language that uses iconic symbols to represent actions to be taken on data.

While the developers were working on the code, diagrams were used to clarify some of the discussion, and it was decided to make the diagrams themselves executable. Prograph was an abbreviation for Programming in Graphics, a visual dataflow language.

For several years, Prograph was used in Prograph Classic and Prograph CPX, commercial software environments for the Apple Macintosh and Windows platforms, but they were withdrawn in the late 1990s.

Around that time, a group of Prograph users founded the Open Prograph Initiative, which was active until about 2005. Participation in the group waned with the advent of the Marten Visual Programming Environment, which is an implementation of Prograph for the macOS packaged in an integrated development environment (IDE), through which Andescotia Software continues to support the Prograph language.

The 1970s brought significant changes in computer programming, particularly in the complexity of newer program languages and the popularity of object-oriented programming and dataflow programming. However, the tools that were used to write programs were similar to those of the last decade.

In the early 1980s Prograph took this a step further, introducing a combination of object-oriented programming and a wholly visual environment. Objects are represented by hexagons with two sides, one containing the data fields, the other the methods that operate on them. In Prograph, a method is represented by a series of icons, each containing an instruction, or perhaps a group of instructions. Within each method, the flow of data is represented by lines in a directed graph. Data flows in the top of the diagram, passes through the instructions, and flows out the bottom.

The focus of this category is on the Prograph programming language, which will include any close implementations, editors, IDEs, or other tools created to facilitate programming with the language. Prograph user groups, forums, tutorials, or guides are also appropriate for this category.

 

 

Recommended Resources


Search for Prograph on Google or Bing