SynthModules

Conform...  conform!

I agree 100% on having some standards.  I think it's in all our best
interests if we're serious about sharing and building a useful library
of programs.

How about a 5 member program review board.  The individual board members
would examine programs as they are submitted, then they would conviene
on a bi-weekly basis to debate the usefulness, coding and overall beauty
of the programs (intresting LED effects would be given special
consideration!).  Each program would then be voted on, and those that
receive a majority of board member votes would be posted on the Yahoo
site.  Board member terms would be for 1 year, and elections would be
held on the second Tuesday of July.  PSIM owners would vote by recording
a 56k MP3 of their SpeakJet chip reading the names of the board members
they are voting for.

Ha ha ha ha.  
OK, no more Mountain Dew this morning =)

Andrew

>>> jmahoney@gate.net 05/13/04 9:57 AM >>>
Brice had written:
> One of these days... I'll take *all* the code offline and fix it all
then
> re-upload it.

While I'm going to make some comments below, I'd like you all to
consider
this as sort of an opinion poll. Your answers will probably fall into 2
categories: "It ain't broke, don't fix it" and "Yeah, maybe we should do
[something]."

Before I get started, let me once again say a hearty "Thank you!" to
those
trailblazers who have hacked a path through the jungle and -- to mix
metaphors -- laid a foundation on which we can all build. The following
is
meant to be constructive, from the viewpoint of someone looking with
hindsight at the previous work.


One of the things that strikes me when I review the existing programs
(besides how cool and easy to program the PSIM is) is the variable
naming.
Now, I understand that all you "early adopters" have gotten used to
these
names. However, we all hope that the future will bring more people into
the
PSIM fold, so an effort to make the standard names more understandable
may
be good in the long run.


I. ALL CAPS
Why are we using all caps? The language is not case sensitive. Just
curious.


II. Designator for common variables
There are a number of variables that have been defined by Brice, Grant,
Dr
Mabuse, and others. These are the standard things that we will be using
all
the time, such as ADC1 and DAC1V. I'm just wondering if it would be
sensible
to adopt a prefix (or suffix) to identify them. Perhaps a lowercase "g"
(as
in "global", although all vars are global) so we would have gADC1 and
gDAC1V. Maybe "psim" is a better prefix. (Maybe I should just shut up!
;-)

An alternative would be to leave the existing names alone, and use a
prefix
on one's own variables: myNote, myLoop. But, one reason to clearly
identify
the "standard" vars is so that users know immediately which variable
names
should not be changed, because they are used in the common subroutines,
etc.
Such a convention also helps users avoid stepping on variables used in
the
low level subroutines. I admit that we are not dealing with large
programs,
so I hate to make too much of this.


III. Names
Some variables have nice, descriptive names, like STOPLED. On the other
hand, the Stop button is IN5. Why is that?

And then there are ADC1, DAC1, and DAC1V. What's this about? I know that
the
inputs are ADCs and outputs are DACs, but the PSIM is labeled IN-1 thru
IN-4, and OUT-1 thru OUT-4. Therefore, I suggest that ADC1 would be
better
named "In1." DAC1V could be "Out1." Isn't that more intuitive?

(Or gIn1, gOut1, gDAC1... Gin and gout? I guess those are weird looking
names.)

As for DAC1, that's fine as-is (or as gDAC1 if we use prefixes). The
LOADALLDACS routine will move Out1 thru Out4 to DAC1 thru DAC4, but
that's
not really user code. I'm not concerned about the var names used in low
level code.


That's about it. Please try not to flame me too severely if you
disagree.
There are some IT pros here, so I'd like to hear what they *and* the
novice
programmers have to say.

Wow, thanks for reading all the way through! :-)
--
john




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