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About Eidola Project Status FAQ Contact |
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| Here's a grab bag of links submitted by friends and Slashdot readers. Some are more relevant to Eidola than others. You're welcome to submit a link. | Representation Independence | ||||||
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Mozart is a project very similar to
Eidola. Unlike Eidola, it is designed to work with existing languages through
a parser/unparser mechanism. Mozart's emphasis seems to be on interactive transformation
of code through "thin tools".
The idea of SCID -- Source Code In Database -- leads to much of the same discussion as the more general idea of representation independence. (See also A Database Kernel in the Eidola examples.) Intentional Programming is an interesting research project at Microsoft. An intention is a kind of representation-independent semantic abstraction. The project's inventor modestly informs us that "Intentional Programming is the most exiting thing happening today in software engineering". See also The Death of Computer Languages. The GCC Node Introspector is working on using XML to externalize the internal parse structures of GCC. There was some discussion of whether the patents held by Microsoft regarding Intentional Programming threaten this project; this discussion obviously has relevance for Eidola as well. Common Lisp abstracts away its textual syntax with the READ function, leading to a somewhat representation-independent idea of syntax. | Visual Programming | ||||||
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Margaret Burnett keeps an extraordinarily comprehensive
bibliography of visual language
material from academia, as does the WWW
virtual library.
An interesting study on visual languages by Whitley & Blackwell concludes that programmers have a strong bias for the familiar. Surprise! Prograph is a purely visual dataflow language which generates code for a VM. Boxer is a language derived from Logo. It has an interesting graphical structure of boxes within boxes, which mingles programs, documentation, and output. Cube is a purely visual programming language composed of 3D shapes. Befunge is the least representation-independent language I've ever seen. Strictly speaking, it does not belong to the category of the visual languages...but then, look at the code examples! Perl, eat your heart out. | User Interfaces and Notation | ||||||
| Nooface is Slash-based collection of interesting ideas and wacky projects pushing the limits of user interfaces. | Software Engineering | ||||||
| IBM's Hyperspace project is a way of modularizing code in different ways at different points in the development process. | Programming Language Design | ||||||
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Java is the language semantically closest to Eidola.
Gilad Bracha, the "computational theologist" behind Java, has an interesting collection of papers on object-oriented language design. The FOOL workshops contain lots of fun, arcane academic papers on OOP. I'm told that Unrealscript is an interesting OO language. Claudio Nieder pontificates on programming languages. | Language and Perception | ||||||
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Representation
independence music? Oh, Michael Saunders, you madman!
Several projects, including Blissymbols, The Elephant's Memory, and Earth language, have created interesting idiographic metalanguages. Signwriting and Dancewriting take on the interesting task of notating body movement. If you're going to ponder perception in a dark room by yourself for a while, get the philosophical overview. | |||||||