Design document

["Andrew D. Hwang" <ahwang@mathcs.holycross.edu>]

Hi all,

Despite the (extremely...) long delay, design work on the Next Generation
is proceeding. The current design document is available as a LaTeX
tarball:

  http://mathcs.holycross.edu/~ahwang/software/spec0.6.tar.bz2

The Picture class is nearly finalized (I hope), and I'm confident that the
overall design is both workable and sufficiently flexible to accommodate
much more advanced features. (Robin Blume-Kohout deserves a good measure
of credit for the localized, object-oriented aspects, though of course all
design gaffes are my fault.)

The specifics of Paths and Meshes aren't fully written up, but again I'm
fairly confident that the design is converging, to the point where coding
is within sight. (!) Hidden line removal seems to be the biggest obstacle
to having a "complete design", but conversely hidden line removal needn't
be implemented right away.

In theory I have an ssh client that can talk to savannah (the CVS server
at gnu.org) so it should be possible to upload sources in the near future.
(I've only written various helper classes, not much more than in January.)
Willing and able designers/coders/co-authors are extremely welcome!

--Andy

Andrew D. Hwang			ahwang at mathcs dot holycross dot edu
Department of Math and CS	http://mathcs.holycross.edu/~ahwang
College of the Holy Cross	(508) 793-2458 (Office: 320 Swords)
Worcester, MA, 01610-2395	(508) 793-3530 (fax)