Making a script editor

It would be neat to do something similar with ScIDE (ScintillaNET).

Has anyone made a graphical script editor? My language right now is rather scheme-like in syntax, and can be visualized as a tree rather easily. I think it might be cool to implement a graphical tree program editor.

Anyone have ideas? Is there a reason why it wouldn't work? It might be weird to code on at first, but it might be kind of nice loooking.

Quote:

Original post by DracoLacertae Has anyone made a graphical script editor?

Something like XNA Build?

By graphical/visual I didn't mean as in Visual Studio, where there word visual means just an IDE. I mean a graphical representation of the code, where the language primitives are nodes on a tree.

Like this, but less ASCII-ish:

x     x2   y     y2|     |    |     |-[sub]-    -[sub]-  |           |[square]   [square]   |          |   |----[add]--          |        [sqrt]          |       return distance          

Quote:

Original post by DracoLacertae Has anyone made a graphical script editor? My language right now is rather scheme-like in syntax, and can be visualized as a tree rather easily. I think it might be cool to implement a graphical tree program editor. Anyone have ideas? Is there a reason why it wouldn't work? It might be weird to code on at first, but it might be kind of nice loooking.

I did run across this:

edit: image linked for the greater good

when I was browsing the Unreal Technology page.

Personally, I find it a bit confusing, but it might be more convenient for those right brain, spatially oriented artists (if you happen to buy into the analytical/spatial brain dichotomy).

If you think it would be cool, by all means go ahead and implement it. That's the fun part! If you aren't doing it for fun, then you need to think about whether or not a graphical script editor will be worth the time. I happen to be the kind of person who would pay to *not* use a graphical script editor.

[Edited by - The Reindeer Effect on July 18, 2006 1:40:11 PM]

Hi,

Another visual language is National Instruments LabVIEW. Have a look here.

Cheers,
dhm

Yeah, it's all for fun. I've messed around with labview before at school and work. It's mostly for just measurement and control A game requiring the labview runtime would be surprising.

That Unreal graphical editor looks a lot like the state machine diagrams we would draw in school. I think the ultimate graphical programming language would use trees for expressions, and state machines to show behavior. I think I'll try it!

I didnt make it but For the Lego Mindstorms robot kits there is a program called robolab which you program it via building a flowchart with little elements and running wires in between them...Having worked with it for Lego Robotcompitions it is definately not the most time effcient programming method. Too much clicking and "wires" to move around.

What might be nice for a C-like language would be a 'graph view' simmilar to the one offered by IDA Pro (a disassembler), where it breaks code into blocks that have one entrance and one exit.
You'd want to modify it to include the conditional as part of the destination block for C/C++, so that instead of 'if' being at the end of one block, the "if(){}" would be one block as would each "else{}".

I personally had no trouble using ScintillaNET on my custom scripting language. You can see a pic here.