ABSTRACT DATA TYPE BASED PROGRAMMING STYLE AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS

Abstract

The next generation of "intelligent" industrial robots will necessitate off-line programming systems in which generative graphics (picture generation) and cognitive graphics (picture understanding) is combined. This will require programming languages that comprise graphical data types. The classical implementation of a graphical programming system in the form of a procedure package deals with representations of graphical objects and thus does not provide graphical data types. However, modern abstract data type based languages allow graphical data types to be introduced as user-defined abstract data types. The features of such a language, CLU, is discussed, and the implementation of a graphical data type in CLU is illustrated by a simple example.