FORMULATE SOLUTION TO THE VISUAL PROGRAMMING CHALLENGE

The objective of the Visual Programming Challenge is to provide a comp arative basis for evaluation of progress in the development of visual/ multimodal languages, particularly for non-professional programmers. P resented herein is one solution to this challenge. It is expressed in Formulate, an equation-based (or form-based) programming language. For mulate employs a non-linear two-dimensional combination of textual and visual representations. While the language retains a high degree of e xpressiveness it is targeted at individuals with minimum to no formal programming training. Building on the successful ideas of spreadsheets , Formulate attempts to generalize such ideas while keeping simple sol utions simple. In this paper, a brief introduction to Formulate is giv en, followed by a description of the Formulate solution to the VPC pro blem. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.