Hi Tarun
Thanks for the comments. I respond below:
On 07/03/15 03:49, TARUN GUPTA wrote:
Hi guys,
I have installed ASCEND and currently reading the documentation.
During the process two ideas came in my mind. I would like to
suggest/propose those ideas and hope you consider them.
1. That there is already an open project on GUI improvements and
packaging for mac os x needs to be done in another project and the
current GUI is based on PyGTK framework. I have good fluency in python
as well as kivy which is another GUI framework based on python.
The thing which I would like to suggest is that the for both GUI
Improvements and packaging for Mac OS X , I would like to make the
installer based on kivy GUI framework which may solve both the issues
and it can thus be converted for an application on a mobile device
both android and iOS.
In my view, the 'porting to mac' effort
(http://ascend4.org/Porting_to_Mac) is more about nice clean bundling of
the current GTK-based GUI in a form that makes it easy for Mac users to
experience ASCEND. I know that GTK isn't perfectly Mac-ish (and it's not
perfectly Windows-ish either) but having a unified cross-platform GUI
for ASCEND greatly reduces our the development resources we need to
devote to GUI aspects and hence seem to me to be the right way to go.
Having said that, I am sure we would be very receptive to any 'proof of
concept' work that you'd like to do to show that there's a better way.
It would need to be genuinely cross-platform, supporting at least OSX,
Windows 7+, Linux.
If you are interested in free-form GUIs, and willing to work in
something closer to what we're already doing, you might like to check
out http://ascend4.org/Canvas-based_modeller_for_ASCEND. There's lots to
be done to get this new GUI ready for general use, lots of issues with
interfacing between the GUI and the underlying computation engine remain.
2. The second thing is that now the models use ASCEND language which
can be difficult to understand(my personal opinion), so in order to
solve that issue for users can ASCEND be completely implemented in python.
I agree that the ASCEND language has some pretty obscure syntax. I
remember the feeling of "oh wow, that's horrible syntax!" when I first
encountered it, too. It has its roots in some fairly outdated coding
practises, and it shows its age.
There are various things that could be done to modernise the ASCEND
syntax. I think that lowercase keywords would be a good start, and also
some nicer ways to declare variables and arrays. Then there is the WHEN
and CONDITIONAL etc syntax, which is pretty terrible. Then there is the
ODE syntax, which has been improved recently
(http://ascend4.org/User:Ksenija), but more is possible. Obviously such
activities are very disruptive to the codebase, and need to be carefully
managed (eg tools developed to translate models from old to new syntax)
before a transition can be completed.
Reimplementing ASCEND completely in Python would be an enormous task,
and would also make ASCEND much slower than it is. You will understand
this better once you understand a bit more about what the ASCEND
compiler and solver are doing. Again, it doesn't mean a bit of 'proof of
concept' work isn't interesting or worth doing, however.
Cheers
JP
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