Self-generating programs - Cascade of the blocks

Abstract

When building complex applications the only way not to get lost is to split the application into simpler components. Current programming languages, including object oriented ones, offer very good utilities to create such components. However, when the components are created, they need to be connected together. Unluckily, these languages are not a very suitable tool for that. To help with composition of the components we introduce cascade - a dynamic acyclic structure built from blocks, inspired by the Function Block approach. The cascade generates itself on-the-fly during its evaluation to match requirements specified by input data and automatically orders an execution of the individual blocks. Thus the structure of a given cascade does not need to be predefined entirely during its composing/implementation and fixed during its execution as it is usually assumed by the most approaches. It also provides a real-time and fully automatic visualization of all blocks and their connections to ease debugging and an inspection of the application. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.