A Programming Language for Architectural Symbolic Modeling

In this paper a software project supporting architectural design is outlined. Such a project aims to develop the new design language PLASM (a Programming Language for Architectural Symbolic Modelling), which is planned to be a very high-level, user-oriented language, belonging to the class of constraint languages. The language PLASM will support a small set of abstract data types which are significant in various outstanding problems of architectural design, and will offer both procedural features and non-procedural constraints satisfaction. It will allow the designer to make use of a large set of computing tools in any phase of architectural design, in order to explore a wider set of design solutions. Customizable evaluation functions will be available in the language. The execution of a PLASM program may result either in generating or in updating a semantic network over a set of data objects solving the geometric problem under consideration. The proposed language will support both abstract data types significant in the design domain, and tools performing automatized data generation and transformations between different data types. The modification of any object in such a system, both performed by editing a daemon program and/or by interactively modifying a data object, will result in the immediate propagation of changes into the problem network, by activating a message passing mechanism.