[cells-devel] A shocking proposal

[Kenny Tilton]

Raistlin Magere wrote:

>>Do me a favor, let me know everyone what you think of the text-based
>>tutorials on Bill's blog and in my own 01-cell-basics.lisp (and there
>>is more if you want to look at the regression tests in the cells-test
>>subdirectory or go to my web site and grab some old, obsolete PDFs).
>>    
>>
>
>I liked your 01-cell-basics.lisp as it gave a first feeling of what cells is
>about also I liked Bill's one as it introduced the idea of filtering the
>values before using them (something that obviously needs doing in a
>real world problem but that I had no idea, nor I would have expected,
>you had implemented).
>
You're the second person who liked synapses. That came up when I did a 
physics sim of a pendulum and I needed to optimize a little. Lots of 
potential in those little critters, for expressiveness as well as 
performance. User-definable as well.

>However as side problem with Bill's example I never got to see the
>status of the pump on closed from a def-c-echo call until when at the
>end I called (status *motor1*) and everything updated. It wasn't clear
>if the reason was the filtering or something else.
>
OK. As I roll out the tutorials I will solicit feedback form everyone to 
refine them. I did do that with 01-cell-basics, but it was just one 
reviewer.

>
>The problem with 01-cell-basic is that it is indeed quite basic so things
>like drifters are not introduced, nor filtering, nor any other goodies you
>are currently hiding in your source code.
>
<heh-heh> I should have known that early adopters would want the crash 
course and not the gradual buildup to razzle-dazzle stuff.

>So yeah they are good but only to get a first inkling of the potential of
>your system. However I haven't looked at your test directory in detail
>yet nor at the other pdfs on your site.
>
yeah, there's good stuff sprinkled all over, including in the cells-test 
regression suite. Gotta pull it all into one place and add a reference.

>Side Note: in your most recent release you still have a `while' ..
>
Damn, I had a feeling I had done that. Now if I only new CVS! lesse:

Soon.

>that is
>incompatible with acl (I replaced it with acl:while although you mentioned
>that changing it to a do will make it portable) which is present in the
>data-flow source file.
>
>Regarding linking cells to LW, well I have got a copy of LW Personal
>installed on my computer as I wanted to give it a look however after
>having started it I was already missing my acl (although older version).
>
yep. may I can featurize the examples for ACL and MCL, too, since both 
are already done. I'd just have to bury them under a common framework.


>Well linking Cells tutorial to Cello (and ACL and LW) I would like that
>though I appreciate that not using Linux I am not entirely impartial ;)
>However I was just wondering is there not a demo of ACL running on
>Linux? and if so is the GUI linkages so different that Cello would not run
>on it?
>
I am pretty sure they have not yet ported Common Graphics, their CAPI, 
to Linux.

kenny