aiSee Application Examples: Smute
Visualization of a sample quantified boolean formula. The GDL source of the graph was automatically generated by Smute from a sentence of a sample context-free language.
Smute is a special-purpose, directly interpretable programming language especially designed for the implementation of functions processing data.
Smute’s main features include:
- Special support for the processing of recursively structured data. For many of the operations typically occurring in processing such data, Smute offers predefined instructions and datatypes. Examples include data instance manipulations and identifier-related operations.
- Abstraction from specification-irrelevant implementation details, such as the layout of data structures and the handling of error conditions.
- High efficiency — both in terms of runtime and memory requirements.
- Platform independence. The Smute Interpreter is written in C and depends on nothing but the ANSI Standard C library. It can thus be made available for most computer platforms, enabling Smute code to be executed without any adaptations on any of the platforms.
- Support for large data instances (dynamic implementation), not limited by anything but the available hardware resources and the 32-bit arithmetics.
- No restrictions on the usage of recursive function calls, and no disadvantages whatsoever resulting from their usage.
- Data I/O support to the largest possible extent.
- Function user interfaces designed to save valuable development time.
- Modularity, non-redundancy, support for (dynamic) linking.
- Auxiliary features for debugging and testing, including built-in functionality for the visualization of arbitrary recursively structured data (e.g., quantified boolean formulas like the one shown above).
I have reviewed five graph layout tools with regard to their
tree visualisation capabilities. aiSee proved to be by far
the most suitable one. Some of its advantages are:
- fully configurable visualizations (colors, shapes, layout, etc.),
- excellent on-screen display with zooming and scrolling features,
- various export options,
- availability for various platforms, and
student license conditions.
Norbert Pfaffinger, Vienna University of Technology