a perfect fit.(Technology Information)

Maximize productivity with customized code

When off-the-shelf software doesn't suit the task one may want to consider the host of packages available offering the flexibility to create custom applications--without starting from scratch.

To assure the leanest and fastest code when building engineering applications, low-level programming languages such as C, C++, and Visual Basic represent the most common alternatives. Yet, those traditional languages, are general-purpose by design, and do not supply dedicated instructions to simplify the creation of data analysis and visualization applications.

In support of graphical programming environments, James Zachman, president of Hyperception (www.hyperception.com), believes that engineers are creative people who need to be working at the concept level, rather than being concerned with registers and interrupts. "The tool basis has to change. The people who are still pushing text editors are climbing a tree to get to the moon."

However, not everyone concurs that graphical programming is the ultimate panacea. As Bendrix Bailey, chairman of ComputerBoards (www.computerboards. com), observes, "Graphical programs become visually complex--it takes about five times the page area to program graphically as it does to write the words syntactically. It takes 10 to 20 times the machine cycles to execute a graphical program as it does a syntactic program. And a graphical program is symbolically more complex for the same reason that it takes 26 letters to represent our entire vocabulary in English, where it takes 10,000 characters to do the same job in Chinese."

That symbolic complexity inherent in graphical programming may translate into composing, documenting, and de-bugging complexities, as well. Comprehending the basic functionality of the application also grows more difficult as the size of the program escalates. Hidden code behind the symbols can ...