Dear Steve,
Just a quick note to let you know I downloaded your SCADD.bas file
this afternoon. I've only had a brief read through the code--and I'm still
trying to come to grips with the Basic Scripting Engine of DeltaCad- but
it's a most impressive effort. I'm sure I'll be a lot wiser when I've had
a chance to work through things in detail.
In the meantime, a couple of southern hemisphere glitches have
popped up on first compilation. i) in the data verification do loop, the
code won't permit the entry of southern hemisphere latitudes; I amended it
to read" If ABS (prompt.latitude) < 25" etc. The message which follows
should also be amended accordingly. ii)For some reason which I can't see at
the moment, I couldn't enter .latmins or .longmins (I was attempting -34 52
and -138 30) and had to settle for zero. iii) the text "TZ Meridian" was
opaque to me until I got the prompt spelling out "Timezone meridian". Then
I ran in to the next bump. In South Australia, for reasons which have
everything to do with commerce (nearer Sydney time...) and nothing much to
do with solar logic, we are +9 hrs 30 min of GMT. That puts the longitude
of our time zone at -142 30. Which was rejected. As was a decimal
version, -142.50. Again, I'm too new to this version of Basic to know why
the latter wouldn't fly. Finally, when the MOST IMPRESSIVE!! output rolled
out of the printer, the hour lines began, intermittantly at 9:15 am, and
ended in the same way at 3: 15. Outside of the dayarc, they resumed. My
untutored hunch is that the southern sign of latitude is producing an
incorrect value for "twilight" or "bearing" or another like variable.
But: to reiterate: this is a tour de force of programming. I'm most
impressed. The result seems to be a complete vindication of your remark
some time back:
>At present, I can't see any reason why the wriggley lines of the Civil Time
>adjusted Azimuthal dial (a.k.a. Dali dial) should not apply to other types
>of dial, thus eliminating the need for an Equation of Time plaque. Using the
>Horizontal dial as an example, if the 12 o'clock line were to wriggle like
>an EoT graph, then the user would just have to take the time reading at the
>appropriate distance from the centre (point where style cuts dial face).
>Using the same argument, a wave line could be drawn for the other hours
>too. If the lines don't start right at the centre, it would even be possible
>to have two sets of hour labels for standard time and for daylight saving.
>
>This ought to apply to other types of dial. Do such dials exist, or am I
>missing something? If they exist, has anyone got URLs for pictures?
Thanks for sharing the code with us,
Peter Mayer
=====================================================
Peter Mayer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Politics Department tel: +91-8-8303-5606/
+91-8-8303-5610
University of Adelaide fax: +91-8-8303-3446
Adelaide, SA 5005
Australia
=====================================================
