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Magic Mailing List |
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From: R. Timothy Edwards (tim AT stravinsky DOT jhuapl.edu) Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 12:14:19 EST
Dear Erik, > the "windows" version and the wrap-magic-in-a-gui deal > is making us all burn the current magic to cd-roms and encasing > it in glass. Don't worry; I'm not going to do anything to degrade the stability of the magic source. Actually, the Windows version has very little effect on the source; it's just another set of routines in the "graphics" directory. The only other place it touches the code is that Windows demands that "main()" be renamed "WinMain()" or else you can't get hold of a handle to the display. So that won't break any code. I am still working out how the wrapper works, but essentially all of the additional code goes into a single ".i" file used by SWIG, so that doesn't break any of the code, either. At some point, I will probably be advocating the "try it you might like it" approach, but believe me, I really hate "feature creep" and want to keep it to a minimum. Feature creep has rendered many a tool virtually useless, and I don't want that to happen to magic. The nice thing about the interpreter-wrapped version of magic is that it encourages people who want new features to add them as scripts. That gives users the ability to twiddle with magic's functionality without touching the C code itself, and users who don't want the features aren't forced to accept them along with the package. There are quite a lot of minimally-implemented and partially-implemented features which got added to magic over the years, and I'm hoping that they can be expunged from the core code, making magic "leaner and meaner". Regards, Tim
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