Heterogeneous Visual Languages

After more than a decade of research, visual languages have still not become everyday programming tools. On a short term, an integration of visual languages with well-established (textual) programming languages may be more likely to meet the actual requirements of pratical software development than the highly ambitious goal of creating purely visual languages. In such an integration each paradigm can support the other where it is superior. Particularly attractive is the use of visual expressions for the description of domain-specific data structures in combination with textual notations for abstract control structures. In addition to a basic framework for heterogeneous languages, we outline the design of a development system that allows rapid prototyping of implementations of heterogeneous languages. Examples will be presented from the domains of logical, functional, and procedural languages