R113 — R117: carving plaster

The latest functionality adding revision was R112 adding labels to make navigable constellations. The following revisions (currently R113 — R117) have the general intention to refactor the celestial objects in order to allow dynamical class creation to be perused in the mkmap language; the redevelopment was originally slow, actually I didn't know what class model to use.

For celestial objects, it is necessary to be able to define the classes in runtime. Therefore I'll prepare a class system with inheritance, where the class tables list what attributes are available, what types those attributes have, and in what bytes they are stored within an object of that class.

For map projections, it will suffice with hard coded projections defined in the mkmap code. I'll therefore peruse structs containing a pointer to the virtual table containing pointers to the function performing the projection on a position ⟨α, δ⟩ given certain projection parameters.

I'll document the implementations in better detail elsewhere.

The releases in chronorder:

• R113 (Mar 26, 2011): "REFACTORINGS: ..." is a self-glorifying name for: "I didn't do very much, except shuffle around the code arbitrarily"
• R114 (Apr 2, 2011): same thing also this revision
• R115 (Apr 14, 2011): added a Knobel list of star descriptors (≈ names) never used in West, but listed in Al Achsasi's calendar from 1534¹) as stars along the ecliptic, not very important
• R116 (May 7, 2011): "intermediary code chaos revision", the star struct partially replaced by plain allocated memory, working on Linux only.
• R117 (May 16, 2011): "Carving plaster" the star struct now fully replaced by plain allocated memory, working on Linux and Windows; the object types (classes) won't be readable as structs in the code.

"Carving plaster" means that I'm working outside the PL abstractions (f.ex. structs) to be compared with the furniture of the room, and working with the computer raw material "the walls": bits-n-bytes. Now the task at hand is to be directed towards documenting and coding so that I (and code readers) get a grip on how it is implemented.

¹)

Western star names are generally some kind of pronunciations of Arabic star names, f.ex. Rigel (α Orionis) is from Rijl Arabic for "foot", but those names were generally transcribed in the wake of the First Western Renaissance of circa 1100–1347, presumably from the newly conquered library of Toledo in the Reconquista where Spanish Christian powers conquered the islamic Al-Andalus step by step. Many transcriptions were severely obfuscated by misread Arabic letters.