updated 2003-06-05.
see also
Ike Nassi recommends SmartDraw for drawing these diagrams!
claims that "Nassi-Schneiderman diagrams" are also called "Chapin Charts".
Unfortunately, it appears no one accepted the challenge. [DAV: I'm surprised there were no entries to the RAID5+ challenge either]
Programmer's Challenge to_program.html#programmers_challenge
Structured Design Part 2: Putting Theory into Practice by George Martin http://www.chipcenter.com/circuitcellar/april01/c0401lt1.htm gives an example for a real program: both N-S and old-style flowchart.
Also known as Chapin Charts, Nassi-Schneiderman (N-S) diagrams [16] are a modern alternative to flowchartsbefore moving on to "entity-relationship diagram (ERD)", "Data Flow Diagrams", "Unified Modeling Language (UML)"
Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams (sometimes referred to as Chapin charts) were introduced in the 1970s (see [Nassi and Shneiderman, 1973] and [Chapin, 1974]) ... As you can see, the diagram is easy to read.before moving on to many other flowcharts, dataflow diagrams, etc.
I'm thinking about writing a graphics editor to help draw NS diagrams.
After a person manually draws it all out and fills in the boxes with text, it seems like it would be pretty simple for the graphics program to dump all the text to a standard text file (".c" or ".pas"), compile and run it.
Maybe it would be nifty to "hide" the graphics information in comments, so that the native file format is *already* a valid program.
What sorts of operations do we need ?
There's other operations, aren't there ?
Tools that can do round-trip "forward and reverse engineering" -- diagrams-to-code and code-to-diagrams -- would be feasible and desirable.
Treemap is a space-constrained visualization of hierarchical structures. It is very effective in showing attributes of leaf nodes using size and color coding. Treemap enables users to compare nodes and of sub-trees even at varying depth in the tree, and can spot patterns and exceptions. Treemap was first designed by Ben Shneiderman during the 1990s. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/ /* was http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap3/ */
`` During 1990 ... I became obsessed with the idea of producing a compact visualization of directory tree structures. ... it was difficult to determine how and where space was used. Finding large files that could be deleted, or even determining which users consumed the largest shares of disk space were difficult tasks.
... I explored ways to show a tree in a space-constrained layout. I rejected strategies that left blank spaces or those that dealt with only fixed levels or fixed branching factors. Showing file size by area coding seemed appealing, but various rectangular, triangular, and circular strategies all had problems. Then while puzzling about this in the faculty lounge, I had the Aha! experience of splitting the screen into rectangles in alternating horizontal and vertical directions as you traverse down the levels. This recursive algorithm seemed attractive, but it took me a few days to convince myself that it would always work and to write a six line algorithm. This algorithm and the initial designs led to the first Technical Report (HCIL TR 91-03) in March 1991 which was published in the ACM Transactions on Graphics in January 1992 ( http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/tog/1992-11-1/p92-shneiderman/ ). Choosing the right name took probably as long, but the term 'treemap' described the notion of turning a tree into a planar space-filling map. ...
... The capacity to see tens of thousands of nodes in a fixed space and find large areas or duplicate directories is very powerful. I still use TreeViz for cleaning up my Macintosh. ... ''
todo: do this on ``my'' files. Download from http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/ or http://treemap.sourceforge.net/ [FIXME: crosslink to mapping ?] [todo: Perhaps write/modify this program to do this for a web site -- not just the files themselves, but also taking into account the headings and subheadings inside files. ]
How hard would it be to make this graph things in more of a TreeGraph / PSD-like format ?
Dia is a drawing program, designed to be much like the commercial Windows program 'Visio'. ... there is support for UML static structure diagrams (class diagrams), databases, [electronic] circuit objects, flowcharts, network diagrams and more.http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/dia.shtml ... http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
Dia has its own Wiki http://faemalia.org/wiki/view/Technical/DiaEditor
[FIXME: yes, but does it do N-S charts ?]
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