page_title: DRAKON
section_title: Family of DRAKON-languages (hybrid languages)
hierarchical_section_title: DRAKON / Family of DRAKON-languages (hybrid languages)
caption_attribution_description: English: The macroicons of the visual programming language DRAKON. Macroicons are the graphical words. They consist of graphical letters — icons. The graphical words of the DRAKON language are called macroicons. Just as words are made up of letters, macroiсons (graphical words) consist of the icons (graphical letters).
context_page_description: DRAKON is an algorithmic visual programming and modeling language developed within the Buran space project following ergonomic design principles. The language provides a uniform way to represent flowcharts of any complexity that are easy to read and understand.
  The DRAKON Editor, which was released in September 2011, is an implementation of the language available in the public domain. It can be used for creating documentation, or for creating visual programs that can be converted to source code in other languages.
  Unlike UML's philosophy, DRAKON's language philosophy is based on being augmented if needed, by using a hybrid language, which can be illustrated as "incrustating code snippets from text language used into shape DRAKON requires". This way, DRAKON always remains a simple visual language that can be used as an augmentation for a programmer who is interested in making their own project code easier to support or other long-term needs for example improving the ergonomics of the coding process or to making code easier to review and understand.
context_section_description: DRAKON (Russian: ДРАКОН; dragon in English) is designed with humanistic ideas in mind, as usage of three different languages for the same project was a source of human factor-related hardships such risks of having a mutual misunderstanding.
  DRAKON is used not as a single stand-alone language but as a family of hybrid languages, such as DRAKON-C, DRAKON-ASM, DRAKON-Java, etc. All hybrid languages of the DRAKON-family have the uniform graphical syntax, based on flowcharts. The standard graphical syntax provides similarity of drakon-charts for different hybrid languages. The text language used uses its own syntax.
  Strict distinction of the graphical and textual syntax along with rich graphics improves flexibility and variety of expressive means of the language. The unification of the rules of the graphical syntax in the hybrid languages secures their conceptual unity.
  The basis of the graphical syntax is a graphical alphabet. Graphical elements (graphical letters) of the DRAKON alphabet are called icons (not symbols). There are 27 icons in the DRAKON graphical alphabet.
  DRAKON has not only icons, but also macroicons. Macroicons are the graphical words of the DRAKON language. Just as words are made up of letters, macroiсons (graphical words) consist of the icons (graphical letters). There are 21 macroicons in the DRAKON language.
  Icons and macroiсons are the building blocks for constructing drakon-charts.
  The important parts of maсroiсons are valence points (in the illustration to the right, they are depicted as little black circles). Into these points, icons or microicons can be successively entered and arranged by drakon-editor in neat, orderly vertical rows.
caption: Macroicons of DRAKON language.
exif: {}