Tycho is an object-oriented syntax manager with an underlying heterogeneous technical rationale. It provides a number of editors and graphical widgets in an extensible, reusable framework. The editors for textual syntaxes are modeled after emacs in the sense the emacs key bindings are used when possible. However, they make more extensive use of menus, windows, and dialogs than emacs. Also, the intent is that visual editors and visualization tools will be fully integrated, something that would be difficult to accomplish with emacs in its current form. Editors for visual syntaxes will be more diverse. The system documentation is integrated, using a hypertext system compatible with the worldwide web. Tycho was originally conceived for use with the Ptolemy system, a heterogeneous design environment from U.C. Berkeley, but it has grown into a system that is useful on its own. Tycho has been used extensively in the development of the Tycho software itself.
Tycho is written primarily in Itcl, also called [incr Tcl], developed by by Michael McLennan of AT&T. Itcl is an object-oriented extension of Tcl, a "tool command language" written by John Ousterhout of U.C. Berkeley. The window toolkit Tk and its object-oriented extension Itk are also used extensively.
The key objectives of the Tycho project are:
One of the key principles in Tycho is that anything can have a hyperlink to anything else. Documentation will have links to source code, and vice versa. Visual editors will have links to textual editors. And specialized displays can be created for any form of data. These displays, of course, are also connected by hyperlinks.
The interface to Ptolemy kernel will eventually be entirely through ptcl, the Tcl extensions that provide an interpreted command language for the Ptolemy kernel. An interim mechanism is provided where Tycho forms a subsystem within the much older visual editor for Ptolemy called "pigi" (which stands for Ptolemy interactive graphical interface).
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