Software Development

I was busy with other projects and really wanted to quench my thirst for programming due to withdrawal symptoms. I needed something quick, but fun. So Mandelbrot it was. I think the last time I programmed a Mandelbrot set was way back in my University days when computers available there went from 8088 to Pentiums and video cards went from CGA to SVGA. The very first Mandelbrot set I did at University was in CGA with a monochrome monitor in a computer lab for first year students. (edit: I should add that I wrote this in Modula-2, awful language that it is.) These machines were ancient. I also wrote a program to compute Julia sets. Most people had no clue that these machine could do graphics at all. The reaction from others in the computer room was quite entertaining because normally, the ambiance in there is somewhat like the movie Das Boot. Tons of people in a large, but confined space. So when someone did something to change the monotony of working on assignments, it was often very motivating since people wanted to know how it worked. Oh yeah, back then, it was direct access to the video card. No fancy API's.

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Here is another theory that is commonly accepted, but is completely bogus. In the first part of this article, I only want to dispute the theory. The second half of this article deals with mapping natural numbers to real numbers. I'm playing devil's advocate in the second part because I actually believe that Cantor's conclusion is correct, but not the theory that he uses in trying to get there. Unfortunately, I must reject the conclusion as well for the time being.

As a quick recap, Cantor's theory says that you can't count to N² by using N entries and N digits. So no matter how many digits you use (say X digits), you can always create a new (X+1)^th number not already listed (by using the opposite of the digits in the diagonal). This is supposed to mean that the list of entries with infinite digits can never be put into a list because if you try to do so, you can create a new entry not found in said list. IOW, the number of entries will always be larger than the number of digits.

BOGUS!

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This post is for reference only.

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Undo functionality is a known problem that is often very difficult to implement. For Project V, I need to implement this. And I'd rather implement it sooner instead of later.

I figured out there are three ways of doing this.

1. Save the state of the entire Project V network (including the GUI) before each command and store it in a stack.

Advantages: Easy to implement.
Disadvantages: Takes huge amounts of memory and is slow as hell. May not even work if too many undo's are stored.

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I'm at the point where I want to build networks and component. I have everything figured out how I want it work data-wise and how everything is stored internally. All that is done. Now, I just need to build the damn thing. Only thing is that I'm stuck. I have no idea how this would work visually.

Sure, connecting components and selecting EXISTING components to place in your network is easy. I'm talking about creating a new component interface. How do I add new inputs? How do I ask the user to select the type and enter the instance name? Isn't that a bit tedious?

I have half a mind to enable a command line where you can tell the GUI what to do. I also think having text based definitions for interfaces wouldn't be a bad idea.

type AddInt32 : component
{
inputs:
  Int32 a,b;
outputs:
  Int32 out;
}

The main objective here is to specify the inputs, outputs and interface name. That's it. That's all a component interface is.

Perhaps I can have a button that creates a new, blank, interface would work. It'll display it blank. And then you can click on an icon on the component itself to display the textual definition where you can update it. This would work well for other types as well.

I could also have each component in the component list treeview have a popup where you can insert that component as a new input or output, or to copy its type in the clipboard.

Any ideas? I've been staring at this for two days. I have no clue what would work best. I don't think this kind of thing really works that great in a visual mode. This is one area where everything is telling me stick with what has worked in the past, text.

If I don't come up with anything better, that's what I'm going to implement. Unfortunately, this means my implementing a text editor. Are there any open source editors that aren't GPL (and are similar to BSD license)? I'll take a look and see if I can find one and port it.

Luckily, connections are simple. Simply click and drag. I can't wait to get to that part. But by then, I'll be working on the runtime engine.

Yeah, I'm thinking I'm gonna implement a command line and a textual mode for different aspects. The text editor could also be used to implement scripts. For those that want traditional dataflow (w/ scripts), what scipting language should I use to start off? I need something rather simple where I can add bindings to existing types and variables. I'm thinking I'll build my own scripting language that looks similar to C. I already have my own parser generator. May as well use it. And I can add dataflow operators to the language. Other people can implement their own scripting language later on.