Welcome to the RAPTOR home page

The content of this page in no way reflects the opinions, standards, or policy of the United States Air Force Academy or the United States government.

RAPTOR is a flowchart-based programming environment, designed specifically to help students visualize their algorithms and avoid syntactic baggage.  RAPTOR programs are created visually and executed visually by tracing the execution through the flowchart.  Required syntax is kept to a minimum.  Students prefer using flowcharts to express their algorithms, and are more successful creating algorithms using RAPTOR than using a traditional language or writing flowcharts without RAPTOR.

Click here to see a picture of RAPTOR.  For a paper describing the use of RAPTOR in a general education course, click here.

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Where/how are you using RAPTOR?   I keep a list of what schools and universities are using RAPTOR and for what class.  This helps me plan future advancements.  Please email me and let me know.

SPRING 2010 VERSION (Updated 8 January 2010)

You can get the Spring 2010 version (4.0.2) of RAPTOR from here (right-click and choose "save target as").  NOTE: requires .NET 2.0 Framework.  Files generated in this version (except those in OO mode) can be opened with the Summer 2007 version.

NEW INSTALLER!  This installer has been tested on Windows XP SP3 (32 bit), Windows XP Tablet PC (32 bit), Windows 7 Professional (32 and 64 bit) and Vista Business (64 bit).  This installer should eliminate many installation bugs from the Microsoft Ink DLL.

NEW FEATURES:

• Input and Output dialogs no longer have radios to select text vs. expression.  This seemed more confusing than helpful.  Now all prompts/outputs are expressions.  Be sure to use "" (quotation marks).
• Set_Precision(digits) allows you to specify how many digits of precision will be in an output.  Set_Precision(2) is useful for currency.  Set_Precision(-1) returns to the default floating precision (4 significant figures).
• Redirect_Output_Append allows you to redirect output to a file, appending the data on the end.
• Current_Year, Current_Month, Current_Day, Current_Hour, Current_Minute, Current_Second, Current_Millisecond -- new time functions
• Current_Time -- returns the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1990 (midnight).

Link to Older Versions

Other Operating Systems

RAPTOR is written in a combination of C# and A# (a port of Ada to the .NET Framework) and is only supported on Windows.  We have experimented with Mono on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.  The Mac version didn't run at all, but we were able to get RAPTOR running on Ubuntu with some features removed.  Here's a zip with all of the files in case you want to try it.

About Modes

Did you know RAPTOR has modes?  By default, you start in Novice mode.  Novice mode has a single global namespace for variables.  Intermediate mode allows you to create procedures that have their own scope (introducing the notion of parameter passing and supports recursion).  Object-Oriented mode is new (in the Summer 2009 version)

RAPTOR is Free!

RAPTOR is free software, but donations to support web hosting, etc. are welcome!

Handouts

• Introduction to Algorithmic Thinking
• Introduction to RAPTOR
• RAPTOR Syntax Guide
• Control Structures
• Analyzing Requirements
• Process Abstraction and RAPTORGraph
• RAPTOR Subcharts and Procedures
• Introduction to Array Variables
• Functional Decomposition
• Older handouts
• Introduction to RAPTOR programming
• Graphics programming with RAPTOR
• Programming loops and selections
• Arrays

For Faculty

• Implementing a RAPTOR test server
• Creating plugin functions and procedures
• Create your own code generator
• Easter Eggs

Authors:

• Terry Wilson
• Martin C. Carlisle
• Jeff Humphries
• Jason Moore

Feedback

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. If you have a comment, suggestion or bug report, send an email to Martin Carlisle.

Acknowledgements

The UML designer is based on NClass, an open-source UML Class Designer.  NClass is licensed under the GNU General Public License.  The rest of RAPTOR, by US Air Force policy, is public domain.  Source is found here.  RAPTOR is written in a combination of A# and C#.  Unfortunately, I don't have the time to provide support on compilation issues. 

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