I am standing by Juan's proposal, do you?

Bill Schwab BSchwab at anest.ufl.edu
Thu Nov 2 23:09:44 UTC 2006


Juan,

I'm not sure we do agree, or you would have said "provide higher level, anti-aliased, graphic transformations" in addition to traditional bitmapped graphics vs. (what I thought I read) trying to kill the pixel concept.  I will likely need to be able to use integer coordinates and bitmaps; I also want to not need to use them.  Optional physical measurements in floating point form to potentially composite transformations is a great idea; just don't forget the bitblt and friends are _really_ useful not to mention fast.  My hunch is that Smalltalk will allow the code to be shared, with floats flying around only if requested somewhere along the chain of inputs and transformations.

To the extent that you are suplementing vs. replacing the basic graphics capabilities, it probably becomes less important.  But speed and flexibility will always be important options, if only because we will want to do ever more on ever smaller devices.

Bill



Juan Vuletich: 
Hi Bill,

Bill Schwab escribió:
> Juan,
>
> If you are truly creating an extension to morphic, perhaps you should
> change the name? Calling it morphic 3.0 gives the impression that you
> plan to replace 2.0.
What I'm doing is not an extension to morphic. It is a redesign. Please
read http://www.jvuletich.org/issues/Issue0002.htm .
> As for the pixel, I must disagree; the pixel will
> die when we have "vector driven" or some other kind of display that is
> not memory mapped. As long as there are discretely addressable
> elements, they should be available, even if there are better ways to
> draw. Imagine external interfacing w/o byte arrays and pointers.
> Granted, we try to hide the details behind abstractions, but sometimes
> we simply have to get our hands dirty.
>
> This thread has passed the point of my being able to follow it. I will
> continue to try to do so, but I know I am missing things.
>
> Bill
>
Then we agree. I see pixels as bits in memory. We all know our computers
use them. But we can safely forget about them when we use our computers
(and program them).


Cheers,
Juan Vuletich




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list