The graphically front end that would help one connect elements is a trick in-and-of itself. As I've mentioned on the writeup page, there's a Pipeline definition language being worked on by W3C, which means that, most likely, someone will write an open source layout tool that would work with this. If I can easily adapt my system to use the pipeline language (which i've looked at and should not be terribly difficult, yet), then I'm set.

I should point out (if I haven't before) that I've done a FBS before in Java about 3 years ago. Then, I used a similar trick as your Khorus tool suggests; the connections were pipes, and each component ran it it's own Java thread. This isn't easily translatable to Perl, though I suspect it can be done; however, because I'm relying on XML and SAX2 events as the connection transfer mechanism, I *may* not be able to do this (I haven't put a ton of thought yet into this, more focusing on just getting something going).

Translating FBP to procedual may be interesting. If there were no branch points, certainly this can be done (massive for-each loops). I'm not sure at this point how handling branches would work yet as well, but that could be a possibility.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important