Asmundis R. (ed.) LabVIEW - Modeling, Programming and Simulations

First published January, 2011
Printed in India
ISBN 978-953-307-521-1
318 p.Released by National Instruments (Austin, Texas) for the fi rst time in 1986 for the Apple Macintosh, LabVIEW was conceived as a practical and original programming environment for hardware control and interfacing with host computer. The main aim was the introduction of an easy interface between a micro-computer and the instruments controlled by it, with a graphical interface which simulates the actual instrument on the computer screen: from this the derivation of the term Virtual Instrument and the more general Virtual Instrumentation. The strong originality of LabVIEW as a programming language, instead, came from the innovative way of programming introduced since the beginning: a pure graphical way, in which the characters-based
program lines are replaced with one or more graphical schemes which take the role of the human interface for the developer specialist. This way both user interface (the windows with which the fi nal user will interact) as well as the source code (the actual program writ en by the developer) have high quality graphics aspects, carrying the two diff erent contents and purposes. A meta-language is internally generated during development processes and is used as source for the LabVIEW Compiler for the generation of the final executive object. This object runs under a specifi c runtime engine which is the real object handled by the Operating System and is automatically
installed with the LabVIEW development system.