Structure of objects and execution

Michael S. Klein mklein at alumni.caltech.edu
Wed Oct 28 01:39:05 UTC 1998


> I haven't see it, but I talked to someone who had. It's just a graphing calculator
> that takes equations as input, right?
> 
> Steve
The equation editor part was derived from Milo (same author).  Milo was good
enough that I did my physics homework on it.  It had little math smarts...
it even got simple integrals wrong. But its strength was being able to do
the grunge of math: commuting terms, distributing and factoring, simplifying
trivial expressions without droping a sign, and as easy as dragging.
For instance dragging X to the right would produce the following 
transformations:

drag this X right
  |
  v
        2      1
(3X + 4X ) = ( - )
               X

               1
(3 + 4X) X = ( - )
               X

         1   1
3 + 4X = - ( - )
         X   X

           1 1
3 + 4X = ( - - )
           X X

         1 
3 + 4X = -
          2
         X

Just trying to type this crap in makes my skin crawl.
This was seconds of work with Milo.
Milo's interface was better than the GraphingCalculator in my opinion.

I remember trying to put equations into comments in Smalltalk once.
Proportional fonts make it that much harder.

Go Smalltalk.  Go MathMorphs!

-- Mike

P.S. do you have access to a Mac?





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