5.9 Programming Interface

  For programming purposes, an object-oriented interface has been implemented that simplifies creation and modification of flow descriptions by user-written applications (Figure 5.5), and also provides interactive editing functions for plain text terminal operation.

 
Figure 5.5:   Object-oriented flow description interface for interactive and automatic editing.

This interface forms the standard entry point for the generation and manipulation of process flows by other application and tools. For example, an automatic conversion tool uses this interface to produce a VISTA flow description from input deck specifications in a NORMAN [CBK93]   input file.

 
• 5.9.1 File Format