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Tycho Overview

Tycho is an object-oriented syntax manager with an underlying heterogenous technical rationale. It provides a number of editors and graphical widgets in an extensible, reusable framework. The editors for textual syntaxes are based on emacs-like text editor. Editors for visual syntaxes will be more diverse. The system documentation is integrated, using a hypertext system compatible with the worldwide web. Tycho has been designed primarily for use with the Ptolemy system, a heterogeneous design environment from U.C. Berkeley, but it is also useful on its own.

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 X-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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Last updated: 96/04/11, comments to: eal@eecs.berkeley.edu