Re: Help!: of Swarm, Objective-C and

[Paul E. Johnson]

"William S. Shu" wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the valuable suggestions.  Most of the problems have "gone away".
> Some others (probably even more naive) have surfaced, or rather, have risen
> in importance:
> 
> 1)    Is there any way of type-checking, at least at compile-time, that the
> entries of a list (or any collections.h object) are of the same (or a
> particular) type (c.f. templates in C++)?  (Writing code to check this seems
> to entail duplicating methods of the list protocol!)
Why doesn't this method in Collections work?

     - (BOOL)allSameClass
     Returns YES if all members are of the same class.
> 
> 2) Swarm examples and Control Panel interaction:
>     a)    Why can one not change parameters via the GUI windows in the
> heatbugs (1.3.1) example -- in fact from all (most?) the examples?
Are you not hitting enter after you put the numbers in the boxes? Enter
is necessary!
> 
>     b)    In which objects/variables should the above values be kept?  How
> can they be accessed from within a program?
You need to do the tutorial distributed with the swarmapps.  Read
through Hello World too.
 Look in the ModelSwarm.m file for some examples of answers to your
question.

> >     c)    One can also change methods from the windows, right? How does one
> do that?  In which variables/methods are they kept or accessed from within a
> program?
Each class can have its own probemap that shows values inside the object
and allows you to change them.  

> 
>     d)    The start button on the control panel seems to mean "resume from
> where you last stopped OR, INITIALLY, start from the beginning".  How can
> one have the meaning of "restart -- perhaps from an earlier point in time,
> possibly the beginning" without having to start a new program run.  This
> provides a sort of roll-back facility or may be useful when you want to
> tinker with parameters (possibly of sub-swarms only) without having to
> restart the whole process!  (Perhaps viewing things this way is not
> necessary, and there may be "swarm-inclined" alternatives for rollback.)
> 
Start does indeed resume. I'm in favor of something like restart, but it
is not built into Swarm yet (maybe never?).  My effort to allow "restart
form beginning" is in a package called RepeatingHeatbugs on my
homepage.  If you can work out the last few kinks in there, you will be
famous.  Its in the Swarm directory of my homepage

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm
-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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