ACQUISITION

THE PROPOSED RESEARCH WOULD DEVELOP AND DEFINE A NOTATION SUITABLE FO SPECIFYING CERTAIN REAL-TIME DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL PRADIGMS FOR IMPLEMENTATION ON A COMPUTER. RESULTS WOULD INCLUDE DESIGN RATIONALE, AND IDENTIFICATION OF RESEARCH CONCERNS REGARDING IMPLEMENTATION. NOTATION WOULD BE AUTOMATICALLY COMPILABLE INTO AN EXECUTABLE FORM. THE PROPOSED NOTATION IS BASED ON A FAMILY OF LANGUAGES WHICH SPECIFY ALLOWABLE PATTERNS BY MEANS OF REGUALR EXPRESSIONS. THIS PARTICULAR VARIANT WOULD SPECIFY PATTERNS OF INPUT MESSAGES WHICH DENOTE BOTH SOURCE AND VALUE. PROGRAM ACTIONS WOULD OCCUR CONTINGENT UPON RECOGNITION OF A SPECIFIED PATTERN OF INPUT "STIMULI". THE LANGUAGE WOULD THUS BE (AT LEAST PARTIALLY) NONPROCEDURAL. A DESIGN OBJECTIVE IS THAT IT BE SUITABLE FOR USE BY NONPROGRAMMERS, AT LEAST FOR SIMPLE CONTROL OR DATA ACQUISITION APPLICATIONS. IT WOULD THUS BE A USEFUL TOOL FOR COMPUTER CONTROL OF SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING EXPERIMENTS, AS WELL AS FOR INDUSTRIAL SMALL SCALE PROTOTYPEDEVELOPMENT. THE LANGUAGE CONCEPT IS RELATED TO SEVERAL OTHER LANGUAGES AND MODELS OF COMPUTATION, INCLUDING PATH, FLOW, AND EVENT EXPRESSIONS; AWK; INPUT-OUTPUT TOOLS; COMMUNICATING SEQUENTIAL PROCESSES; PETRI NETS; AND DATA FLOW LANGUAGES OR MACHINES. IMPLEMENTATION IS ALSO RELATED TO AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF LEXICAL SCANNERS AND PARSERS.