>* File format: I've heard through the grapevine that Uli was working on this
>part. I'm not sure exactly what approach is being taken, but I can offer some
>help in the cross-platform part of things. I recently worked on a project
>using XDR (eXternal Data Representation) which allows you to read/write data
>structures transparently across Intel and Mac platforms. If you are cooking
>up data structures for the file format, this may be a route to consider.
Brian,
glad to have you on board! We currently have a working block file format
which allows read/write access and I've stuffed around 600k of data into
the blocks and it didn't break. Not much, but a start. I haven't yet really
tackled cross-platform, apart from using ANSI C++ to ensure it'll compile.
The thought was to subclass the block file to do endian-conversion
transparently. this would be rather easy, I guess, but if XDR is Open
Source, too, we should certainly consider it. Could you give more info?
We'll also need a streaming facility to access blocks that don't fit into
RAM, and I'm currently rather busy and can't do the real implementation,
I'm afraid (I might hack around it by using temp files, but we've discussed
other approaches which might work better).
>* Interpreter: Now that we have an interpreter running, should we be dishing
>out the implementation of the various xTalk commands? Perhaps we could
>establish an interface so that anyone could, for example, write a C function
>which implements the "answer" command.
I believe Anthony is working on such an interface (It's not in the current
snapshot, but we asked him to add it some time ago).
>* Misc: Basically, if you need another C programmer on the task, I am
>available on a limited basis. So if there are things up in the air, let me
>know and I'll see what I can do.
Pick your favorite. We're also thinking about using the wxWindows
x-platform framework for the actual application -- in case you'd like to do
the UI, I've done a short tryout (I still have to send it to a few people,
do you want a copy?) to see whether it's at all possible).
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.weblayout.com/witness
'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
--- HELP SAVE HYPERCARD: ---
Details at: http://www.hyperactivesw.com/SaveHC.html
Sign: http://www.giguere.uqam.ca/petition/hcpetition.html
