[bmitc]

Aren't conditionals and loops easier in visual languages? If you need something to iterate, you just draw a for loop around it. If you need two while loops each doing something concurrently, you just draw two parallel while loops. If you need to conditionally do something, just draw a conditional structure and put code in each condition.

One type of control structure I have not seen a good implementation of is pattern matching. But that doesn't mean it can't exist, and it's also something most text-based languages don't do anyway.

[zozbot234]

> If you need two while loops each doing something concurrently, you just draw two parallel while loops.

Not quite. You'd need to draw two parallel boxes, each of which is strictly single-entry/single-exit, and draw a while loop in each box. This is because a while loop

     +-------------------+ 
     v         +-->[fn]--^
  -->*-->«cond?»           +-->
               +-----------^

depicts parallel flows that do not represent stuff being done concurrently! Once you acknowledge that, pattern matching actually becomes easy: just start with a "control flow" pattern and include a conditional choice node with multiple flowlines going out of it, one for each choice in the match statement. You're drawing control flow so it's easy to see that the multiple flowlines represent dispatch, not something happening in parallel.

[bmitc]

Here's a picture of what I was talking about:

https://i.imgur.com/AgmF87b.png

Now, the two while loops, as shown here, have no dependencies between each other and are indeed processing in parallel. However, there are various mechanisms in LabVIEW to exchange data between the two loops, the most common being queues, in which case they process concurrently.

You can also have a for loop iterating on an array.

https://i.imgur.com/nRgyckx.png

In LabVIEW, it's nice because it's trivial to configure the loop iterations to occur in parallel (if there are no dependencies between iterations), using all available cores in the computer.

And by pattern matching I meant something like the pattern matching and type destructuring you find in SML, Ocaml, F#, and Elixir.

[zozbot234]

Yes, that's really just abstracting away the control flow I was depicting in my simple diagram. It's treating "while" as a higher order function of sorts, with its own input(s) of type "data flow diagram connecting types Xs and Ys". That's the best you can do if your language only really deals in dataflow, as w/ LabVIEW ]. And that's really what leads to the difficulty you mention with pattern matching. Pattern matching on a variant record is inherently a control-flow step, even though destructuring variables in a single variant should clearly be depicted as data flow.