Why are the class diagrams rendered with non-standard syntax?

Question

For example, the UML standard I'm familiar with specifies a class attribute in this way:

Attribute: Type = DefaultValue

PlantUML shows something like this instead:

Type Attribute = DefaultValue

Answer 1

Hello,

I guess that you are refering to HUTN (Human Usable Textual Notation)
http://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/articles/hutn-basic/
(If you are not, thanks for giving us the references/URL to your tool)

HUTN indeed allows:
Family {
  familyFriends: Family "bloggs"
}

For PlantUML, we have choose something closer to Java/C++/C#/PHP.
In those programming language, the type/class of an attribute is put before:
class Family {
    Family familyFriends = ...
}

The guess is that people are more used to this notation rather than the HUTN one.

But we may consider a @starthutn if there is a real need here.
Anyone knows a free HUTN parser implementation in Java ?

Comments

I'm referring to PlantUML's rendered output diagram rather than the syntax used to specify the input. The UML diagrams I have been using look like those seen here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/content/RationalEdge/sep04/bell/

It would be nice to have an option to create output like that. It would not be necessary to change the notation PlantUML parses to generate the diagram.

---

You can do that:
@startuml
class Flight {
   flightNumber : Integer
   departureTime : Date
}
@enduml
You will have the following result : http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/img/Iyv9B2vMSCl9JCyeKQZcvL9GK4W3S_nASvDIYnIi53ppIbBJKul0KYcf1Ob59QL5gI6PkQb0EPV4abHUhbe0

Is it what you are expecting ?

---

Yes! I didn't realize that would work; the documentation I was reading uses C-like syntax, so I thought that was the only way to do it with PlantUML:

http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/classes.html

Thank you!

---

Ok, we have updated the documentation about this.
Regards,

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The "HUTN Specification"(http://www.omg.org/spec/HUTN/1.0/PDF) mentions a proof-of-concept implementation in Java using ANTLR.
Although I have yet to find the sources, I would very much appreciate HUTN support in PlantUML, because it will allow for interoperability with other modeling software, and if there is a standard, I think it's almost always best to stick to it...