Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Chestnut, Ronald P." <[email protected]> · Wed, 17 May 2006 10:13:47 -0700

Kay,

Mike Laznovsky has been doing a lot with the code lately - he'll be demoing a state-level debugger at the meeting, for example. One other thing he does is spit out extra output with just the skeleton of the state notation stuff - no body text, just states and when clauses.

I looked at some UML-based stuff available as an Eclipse product which seems to draw these diagrams. I tabled that for a later look.

If there is a format which will feed some good program, which, for example, does a rational lay-out and connects the states in a pleasing way, it may well be possible to have snc emit that file as well, rather than writing interesting post-parsers.

Ron Chestnut

-----Original Message-----
From: Kay-Uwe Kasemir [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:05 AM
To: tech talk
Subject: Document, visualize SNL code?

Hello:

Has anybody out there come up with a good way to document sequencer (SNL) - based code?
Do you use ordinary C comments in the code?
A drawing program to generate a state diagram, manually keeping that in sync with the SNL code?

A while ago, Steve Hunt presented initial work on a Java tool for drawing state diagrams and generating skeleton SNL.
Is anybody using that or something similar to create SNL?

Primarily, I'd be interested in going the other way around.
I have SNL code, and would like to visualize it for several reasons as a state diagram.
Does somebody have e.g. a perl script that generates graphviz 'dot'
files from the SNL?
Maybe not the full SNL, only selected states and transitions marked by special comments?

Or have most of you come to the conclusion that state diagrams are great for advertising state machines, but any real state machine is far to complex to be drawn as a diagram?

Thanks,
-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System