I'm trying to port the picturing-programs teachpack to still work with 5.1.  
(BTW, approximately how long do I have to do that before 5.1 is released?)  
Right now it crashes because the API for make-bitmap has changed -- for the 
better, I think, but I still need to fix things.

I've got a "map-image" function that creates a [bitmap] image the same width 
and height as an existing image by mapping a color->color function on its 
pixels, and a "build-image" function that creates a [bitmap] image of a 
specified width and height by mapping a specified function on the coordinates 
of its pixels.  I also wrote (but didn't really document) a "map-masked-image" 
and "build-masked-image" which do the same, but the mapped function is also 
allowed to return #f, in which case the specified pixel is made transparent 
(i.e. alpha=0).  I can tweak those to work with the new make-bitmap, but the 
process got me wondering...

It would be nice if I could allow students to generate alphas other than 1 and 
0.  It seems to me the cleanest way to do this is with an alpha-color struct 
(which existed in htdp/image, but seems to be gone from 2htdp/image).  I can do 
that myself, putting in glue code between it and 2htdp/image to convert back 
and forth among various color-like-things (color, alpha-color, string, symbol, 
color%, and #f for transparency), but 2htdp/image is already doing a lot of 
that, and it feels really inefficient to re-do it.

What would you think of ALL "color" structs actually having an alpha component, 
with the constructor allowing alpha to default to 1?


Stephen Bloch
sbl...@adelphi.edu
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