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As the electronics industry moves toward more widespread use of configurable logic (pld's, fpga's, asic's), there's been a need for alternative methods of schematic entry that are more efficient at handling components whose pinout change with each application.
Schematic symbols are pictoral representations of either package (plan view) or function (pretty view). By separating physical (package pin numbers) from logical (symbol pin names) content, symbol appearance can be inferred from its logical description and schematic pinout is a subsequent choice of physical binding.
For the purposes of this discussion, the combination of logical and physical taken together can be considered to be an abstract representation of the instantiation of a schematic symbol.
This method is referred to as schematic capture in abstraction where net connections are made between components as text (net name pin name) in a file. This provides an alternative to manual entry with traditional schematic capture tools where the text file connects nets to pins and a symbol's appearance is inferred to suit the application.