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Classic and Prograph CPX, commercial software environments for the Apple Macintosh and Windows platforms, but they were withdrawn in the late 1990s.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
Located in Bozeman, Montana, Andescotia’s flagship product is the Marten software development environment, an implementation of the Prograph programming language for the macOS platform. Within Marten, software development is accomplished by drawing diagrams to create program routines, rather than by writing text. The system requirements and an overview of the most recent version of the program are featured, along with video lessons and tutorials, examples, and support data.
http://www.andescotia.com/
Prograph CPX: Visual Programming Applied to Industrial Software Development
Although Prograph CPX is no longer marketed, documentation of the software is presented here, created in PostScript, as written by Philip Cox and Trevor J Smedley. The tutorial begins by introducing the Prograph language, which considers its model of data flow programming, showing how it differs from standard data flow models, and investigates the visual representation of single-inheritance object-orientation as supported in Prograph. Several examples are noted.
http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~haarslev/vl95www/tutorials/TP2.html
Hosted on WikiWikiWeb, the page offers a synopsis of the Prograph programming language, including links to companies and organizations promoting the language or its products, as well as a review of the language, and references to similar languages, offering the author’s experiences in learning to code with Prograph, as well as those of several other programmers and developers. Written on April 27, 2005, the narratives related to the language as it was at that point in time.
http://wiki.c2.com/?PrographLanguage
