Some remarks on developing application programs in Visual

A visual programming environment for users to develop their own defined icon-based Chinese input methods is presented. The purpose is to discuss some interesting ideas on developing application programs dealing with icon objects. It is shown that Chinese characters are concrete icons, that are representable as webs (decomposition graphs). A grammar that generates these webs is a context-free web grammar, and so a Chinese input simulator is a machine that accepts these webs. Developing such a simulator can be regarded as the construction of an user-defined application program. The authors show that a form-based visual approach can be used to specify the simulation behaviors for defining and evaluating icon-based Chinese input methods, although the visual objects dealt with are concrete icons.<>