ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar) (09/05/88)
A few days ago I posted to the net the source to the "hopalong" program, a short and cute math toy, ignoring the traditional route of comp.binaries and comp.sources. The response was favorable - I got about 15 requests for binaries, and NO complaints. And I'd like to do it again. But I feel guilty about it - nobody ELSE posts their small, cute programs to c.s.amiga. And after all, that's what the binary group is for (although I haven't seen anything new there for about a month). One thing I would very much like to see on c.s.amiga is more code- both short examples of interesting techniques, and entire small programs that do cute things. The net is the perfect place to show off your latest display hack - unless it becomes too expensive. I believe that as long as people show reasonable restraint, c.s.amiga is an appropriate place to post short (less than 15K) binaries and sources, while the binaries and sources groups are appropriate for longer, more polished programs. I would like to see discussions on this matter. Now, though I feel guilty about it, I don't feel THAT guilty - so my next post will be the source code to my translation - and a very nice one, if I may say so - of the ROSES program recently posted to comp.graphics. However, I'm going to restrict the distribution to North America. If you're outside of the na region and just HAVE to have a copy of this thing, please send me mail. And if there's anyone out there who thinks I'm abusing c.s.amiga, please speak up! - Ranjit === === === Pa! Molly's dead! She ate some leaves! === === === "Trespassers w" ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu ucbvax!rutgers!super!eniac!... Ranjit Bhatnagar, Graduate Student I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV.
sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon) (09/06/88)
ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar) writes: >One thing I would very much like to see on c.sys.amiga is more code No, please. Code in non-sources groups gets lost more easily than code in sources groups. News saves everything in the source groups in which I'm interested, and I then review and delete uninteresting items. News deletes, within a few days, everything in non-source groups and is lost unless I manually save it somewhere. Some of the things in my personal archive are pieces of source which were posted in non-source groups. Because they were not in a source group, the source archive sites do not have these gems and they have mostly been lost. Put sources in the source groups. -- Scot E. Wilcoxon sewilco@DataPg.MN.ORG {amdahl|hpda}!bungia!datapg!sewilco Data Progress UNIX masts & rigging +1 612-825-2607 uunet!datapg!sewilco "Space is big / Space is dark / It's hard to find / a place to park" - P. daS.
ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar) (09/07/88)
In article <1686@datapg.MN.ORG> sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon) writes: >ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar) writes: >>One thing I would very much like to see on c.sys.amiga is more code >No, please. Code in non-sources groups gets lost more easily than code >in sources groups. ... >... Because they were not in a source group, the >source archive sites do not have these gems and they have mostly been lost. My thought was that the kind of code to be posted in c.s.amiga would be short but sweet things and instructive code fragments - things that are fun and don't take up much space, but are not really important enough to be archived - or if they are that important, the author would've sent them to Fred Fish anyway. One might feel that anything that isn't worth archiving isn't worth posting in the first place; I think there is a gray area between worthless code and code that should be kept forever. For instance, my hopalong program was about 2 hours of work, and would have been 30 minutes for anyone more experienced with Intuition. Any moderately experienced programmer could have written it - yet nobody did, because they didn't see the original article in Scientific American, or they didn't think of it at the time - my posting gave everyone a relatively effortless way to see a cute application of mathematics (those without compilers needed only send mail to get a binary - I've sent about 15 copies out so far), but it was nothing worth saving forever. I think it was the equivalent of an especially good joke on rec.humor. Something to chuckle over and then delete, or keep on a disk full of similar short demos. Well - what does everyone think? And another question - if it were the case that posting sources is OK, how about binaries? For short programs like this, my experience has been that uuencoded binary + source takes up about 3 times as much space as source alone - is it worth tripling the net load to make the program accessible to people without compilers? Perhaps we should post only the binary, and send the source by request? - Ranjit "Trespassers w" ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu ucbvax!rutgers!super!eniac!...