Abstract
Visual languages - invented outside the visual programming language (VPL) community - are quite successfully used around the world. There are e.g. international VL standards used in the telecommuncation, software engineering, or automatic control engineering industry. But alas, most of these language standards were defined without knowing VL definition and design principles developed by the VPL community. This paper suggests a procedure how to employ our knowledge about VLs to develop incremental improvements for widely accepted visual modeling/programming language standards. It starts with a survey of component-based VLs and ends with some proposals how to incorporate modeling-in-the-large concepts into the IEC-1131 standard for Function Block languages.