Notational Freedom via Self-Raising Diagrams (Invited Talk)

Some things are better drawn than coded. However, it takes a lot of work to build a custom editing interface for each new notation, discouraging experimentation. There has to be a better way than Greenspunning poor approximations of Adobe Illustrator over and over again. "Self-raising diagrams" are a promising escape from this trap. Just as source code — a static artefact — "raises itself" into a dynamic running program, a vector graphics diagram — taken to generalise source code — can similarly be parsed, interpreted, and "animated" into a GUI. Notational engineers can then focus on the notations themselves, and their semantics, having left the implementation of drawing interfaces to the experts (implementors of standard vector graphics editors). The tasks of normalising, interpreting, and transforming vector notations contain many relevant problems for the notational engineer — far more relevant than coding line rubberbanding for the umpteenth time!