Labview shortcomings?

[wiebe@CARYA]

Ok. I never use the polymorfic capabilities, so I was just curious.

Thanks,

Wiebe.

"Jim Kring" wrote in message
news:506500000005000000DDD60000-1042324653000@exchange.ni.com...
> Yes,
>
> I said that:
>
> "I am finding myself limited by the tools for implementing one's own
> polymorphic VIs".
>
> My statement is simply that the current implimentation of making
> polymorphic VIs limiting. There are several instances, specifically
> with compound data types, where it is impossible to define a
> polymophic member function for every possible permutation of data
> type. Also I find the management of Polymorphic functions to be a
> chore. What I would prefer is a "broken", or undefined, data type
> that would allow a subVI's
inputs and outputs to be defined by the
> context of the caller. This is not impossible, because it can be done
> with units for numerical data types using the units "$x" syntax (where
> x is a single digit from 1 to 9) see the following link for more info:
>
>
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/A6B7E1D590276DA986256A3A0068
85FB?opendocument
>
> For example, what if I want to define an operation that works for all
> arrays, regardless of the element type. Why should I necessarliy have
> to declare the element type, at edit time. Same thing goes for
> clusters. The only way to do this, right now is with Variants, and
> this is quite cumbersome as well and often requires implementation of
> the core functionality for every possible (or needed) data type.
>
> -Jim

[Johannes Eble]

Hello all,

it is interesting to read the opinion of the LabView specialists in
this thread. Most of the seem 90% happy with LabView.

I would like to add my opinion about LabView. I must admit that I am
not a LabView specialist, but I have some knowlege about other
languages, mostly object oriented.

1) I think that LabView (an visual programming in general) is great
for small to medium-sized projects. But when things become larger, I
prefer text based programming because the visual program gets too
complex. As the diagram gets bigger and bigger, I often found myself
having trouble moving parts of the diagram outside, because there is
no space for a line anymore in the middle of the diagram. In a
text-based language, you simple place the text where you want to have
it.
Also, with high-level (c and even c++ is low-level IMHO) text-based
languages you can have more information per screen size. Probably a
mixture between visual and text-based programming would be ideal: You
begin with a framework of icons and wiring, but the icons themselves
could be programmed in a text-based language.

2) I certainly would like LabView to be fully object oriented: You can
design your own VIs as classes and you can derive other VIs as
subclasses, use them polymorfically and so on.

3) I would like to create my own meta-controls. For example, I have a
programm that uses three GUI vi's. The three GUIs differ only in the
top right corner. Wouldn't it be nice to construct the GUIs out of one
general sub-GUI and three smaller special GUIs for the top right
corner? In general, I am *much* quicker to create a custom dialog
window in languages with an integrated GUI builder, e.g. Visual Basic.


4) It is still tedious for me to arrange the controls in a GUI vi in
order to have a really professional look and feel. I would like to
have a layout manager like GridBagLayout in Java.

5) I would prefer LabView to be implicitely typed as SmallTalk, Visual
Basic and other so-called scripting languages. If one really wants the
explicite type then it could be an option just like in Common Lisp.

6) I would like to be able to rotate the vi's. In general, I think
that the 'wiring' is more flexible in Microsoft Visio, but that might
be due to the fact that I don't use the latest version of LabView (I
don't use the latest version of Visio, either).


Please correct me if some of the above is not true or can be achieved
in LabView. Again, I must admit that I am not at all a LabView guru
and I use version 5.1 which is rather old. I would very much like to
use the new version, but my employer used to say something like "We
have a lot of LabView programs that worked fine with LabView 3.0 and
Windows 3.1". 😉


Best regards


Johannes