Visual Programming with Rules for Ada 9X

Today we conduct software developments with many notations, each having a different style, syntax, and semantics: Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), Statecharts, State Transition Diagrams (STDs), Object-Oriented Diagrams (OODs), and so on. Some of the notations (DFDs, OODs) are informal and therefore of uncertain meaning; others (Statecharts and STDs) are semantically restricted and therefore inexpressive; and most, if not all, are hard to translate into programs. We want to avoid their imprecision, semantic inferiority, and the "indeterminacy of radical translation," forced upon us by using language X for analysis, language Y for design, and language Z for implementation. Ada 9X is semantically rich: anything a software engineer can clearly think, he can think, and say, in Ada 9X. Therefore, we propose Visual Ada 9X, based on "SCOOP" (Software Construction with Object-Oriented Pictures) for the software life cycle's lingua franca. SCOOP, at last, permits Visual Programming with Rules, a breakthrough in software representation. Put SCOOP and Ada 9X together and you get a pictorial, object-based or object-oriented method and process that automatically generates Ada 9X code, improves communication among analysts, designers, implementations, and their clients, and ensures that the pictures they review are the program they get.