Anybody know Neil Soiffer? It looks like he did a degree at UC Berkeley, and then went on to work for Wolfram. He is currently (I think) Senior Scientist Design Science, Inc. His thesis looks like it might very well be the perfect starting point for a literate programming GUI pamphlet (needs a fair bit of updating of course, but he seems to have covered a good many of the basics we would need.) There is a PDF (unfortunately images only) located here:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/TechRepPages/CSD-91-626 Apparently he has copyright (how does this work at Berkeley?) so if he is so inclined he might be able to release it to us. Of course its still valuable as a reference either way, but it sure would be easier building off if it than starting from scratch and referring to it. Does anybody know him? I suppose in once sense it might be better to start from square one - just as with the Units paper, there is a large amount of territory which should be covered before we have the knowledge of what the "best" ideas for a GUI are. His thesis is 259 pages - I suspect in the end (particularly with source code) we will be over a thousand in order to define a really good GUI both as a research project and a functional interface. The advantage (particularly if we do it in lisp and design with an eye for flexibility) is that the same core code could serve a wide variety of interfaces - for example, running as a server effective line breaking code could generate (in theory anyway) MathML which was line broken for display in a browser, given the browser is kind enough to report its dimensions and resizing events. The old symbolicnet site has stashed away on it a bibtex file containing a fairly large collection of computer algebra GUI references. It needs some retooling I expect (I assume the various "portal" sites can provide more fleashed out entries for the individual references, for example) and unfortunately neither of the original authors has responded to my requests for licensing status info, but it will at least be an excellent guide. http://hpc.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/symbolicnet/areas/interfaces/bibtex.bib Cheers, CY __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
