AD[ is a tool for producing action diagrams. Action diagrams are an alternative to Warnier-Orr Diagrams and other graphic tools for presenting algorithms and/or data structures. Action Diagrams may protray both process and data structure.
At Northeast Louisiana University's College of Business Administration, AD[ is used extensively in our introductory CINS 201 course, which covers algorithm design and data structure, and in our introductory COBOL course, for which all program designs must be submitted in Action Diagram form before any code is written.
AD[ was developed under NeXTStep 2.0.
Full source code is provided, as well as the compiled application. There is no need to use the package installer or any other installation procedure -- just put the app in LocalApps or wherever you want.
Please note that AD[ is a NeXT front end to a C program which behaves much as the various "run-off" style text formatters do. adroff (Action Diagram RunOFF) produces an action diagram (see book by James Martin for information on action diagrams) by following formatting commands embedded in a text file. The commands are referred to as "dot commands" because they are signified by having a period, or "dot", in column one; the period is followed by a one or two character command.
The output of adroff utilizes characters from the IBM Extended Graphics Character Set, i.e., characters above decimal 128 in the ASCII collating sequence. Since the NeXT does not provide those characters, you must provide them; we use the IBMKlone font, which is, I believe, public domain. I found the font in a collection of fonts which I picked up from a friend at another institution. (Contact me for further information at 318-342-1125 or rettenmayer@merlin.nlu.edu.) If you do not have the IBMKlone font or equivalent, the diagrams will look rather odd. Please note that the IBMKlone font is specified in the Objective-C source code.
The AD[ front end is essentially derived fromt the TextLab example provided by NeXT. The adroff.c code has been developed over several years by me and many students and has been used on many platforms.
Good luck. Have fun. Let me know if you have problems.
