Re: Another Lurker

[glen e. p. ropella]

> At swarmfest I'm interested in good design practices that are swarm specific
> in the applications.  I've gone through tutorial-1.0.1, hello-world, etc and
> those are great help; concepts over and above this level would be nice.
> Easier user interfaces for those of us who don't dream of objective sheep
> would be a good offline discussion topic as well.

Thanks to Kerry for the phrase "dream of objective sheep"!!! 
That's perfect.  For instance.... (in case you haven't noticed,
I like to beat dead horses...)  where *should* a "copy" method
go?  Should it go inside the object being copied (as, apparently,
OO wisdom suggests) because that object's class is the only thing
with enough knowledge about itself to make an intelligent copy?

Or should it go outside the object (as "normal" [IMHO] 
engineering/manufacturing processes suggest) because the objective
of the copy is known only to the copier, not to the copied.

This forced an "Aha!" (Satori, Eureka, paradigm shift, ...whatever
you call it) on me the other day when I finally realized how far
away Swarm really is from being a modelling tool and how close it
really is to a programming tool.  And OO is the problem!  (I realize
that I'm very close to, if not well-embedded in, heresy, here.  But,
it's a pretty important issue, I think.)

>  The GP discussion will
> also be interesting; has anybody who is interested read either of Koza's
> books?  FYI, for those who don't want to read another book between now and
> Saturday, Melanie Mitchell's book has a nice brief description of GP.  

Definitely!

> I've installed swarm on a laptop with slackware and tcl7.6/tk4.2 and have
> been runing it for a while.  Haven't found any problems, it seems to work
> fine. The raster problem is caused by blt_ZoomStack (I think) and if Barry
> has a solution, great.  I'll be bringing the laptop out to swarmfest with
> all of the user contribs installed so this offers another chance to mess
> with the applications in real time.  

Cool.  We'll have any number of SPARCs for people to run their code
on.  And, also, I don't think it's been mentioned that if you'd like
to have your code available here, but, don't want to carry it on
a laptop or on floppies, then all you need do is upload it via ftp
to 

  ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/incoming

And send me a mail message so I can store it safely away for 
your arrival.

glen