AIDDE the Ames Interactive Dynamic Display Editor

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of the Ames Interactive Dynamic Display Editor language (AIDDE). AIDDE and its associated tools are a software system that facilitates the interactive creation and use of real-time displays. For the present purposes, real-time displays are pictures on a CRT that change over time to reflect the state of a system. A graphics tree describes a display. Display dynamics are specified by attaching expressions to the tree. Offline, AIDDE is used to draw displays, define display dynamics, and generate host computer source code and a representation of the tree convenient for use in a graphics device. At run time, the compiled host code passes the results of the expressions to a graphics device to modify the tree. The graphics processor repeatedly traverses the tree to draw a changing display on the CRT. Several real-time displays have been implemented using AIDDE with good results.