labVIEW

LabVIEW ( Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. LabVIEW is commonly used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation.
The programming language used in LabVIEW, called G, is a dataflow programming language.Execution is determined by the structure of a graphical block diagram (the LV-source code) on which the programmer connects different function-nodes by drawing wires. These wires propagate variables and any node can execute as soon as all its input data become available.
LabVIEW programs/subroutines are called virtual instruments (VIs). Each VI has three components: a block diagram, a front panel and a connector pane. The latter may represent the VI as a subVI in block diagrams of calling VIs. Controls and indicators on the front panel allow an operator to input data into or extract data from a running virtual instrument. However, the front panel can also serve as a programmatic interface. Thus a virtual instrument can either be run as a program, with the front panel serving as a user interface, or, when dropped as a node onto the block diagram, the front panel defines the inputs and outputs for the given node through the connector pane. This implies each VI can be easily tested before being embedded as a subroutine into a larger program.
The graphical approach also allows non-programmers to build programs by simply dragging and dropping virtual representations of the lab equipment with which they are already familiar.LabVIEW includes a compiler that produces native code for the CPU platform.
One benefit of LabVIEW over other development environments is the extensive support for accessing instrumentation hardware.Many libraries with a large number of functions for data acquisition, signal generation, mathematics, statistics, signal conditioning, analysis, etc., along with numerous graphical interface elements are provided in several LabVIEW package options.
LabVIEW is a proprietary product of National Instruments. Unlike common programming languages such as C or FORTRAN, LabVIEW is not managed or specified by a third party standards committee such as ANSI.
For more informations on LabVIEW please visit this link: http://www.ni.com/labview85/industrial.htm