On Mon, 10 Nov 2003 15:15:10 -0500, Kenny Tilton ktilton@nyc.rr.com wrote:
Don't worry, I am not talking about doing a boring GUI example, I am talking about having neat visual effects and clear relationships thanks to the fact that I can draw pretty shapes on the screen that change as you tweak parameters from the repl. For example we can have a container with a fixed number of moles of a gas. we can manifest the temperature via color, moving gradually from blue to red to show gradations of increasing temperature. We'll use Boyle's Law in a rule somewhere, then let the size of the container be mediated by a cell-variable. Then we can setf that value from the repl, see the container get smaller, see the temperature increase. Then maybe we put a goofy thermometer above the box. That has a column of mercury which increases in length as the temperature below increases, but maybe we do that over time (using a new kind of synapse I think I have to invent <g>) or maybe I can do it as a drifter. I can also show how I position the thermometer over the container without calculating actual coordinates. Stuff like that.
Sounds like a very good idea to me - I like it!
I also think that using the LW CAPI would be the right choice. You'd get graphical examples which would work on the three major platforms (and even on FreeBSD with the Linux compatibility layer) without the users needing to go through some installation nightmare.
I'm all for it. Go Kenny!!
Edi.