R159 = V 0.0.1.1 α, Valpurgis 2013

The First Alpha Release!

At last: sternons reached version 0.0.1.0 α (in revision R159). I immediately had to update it to 0.0.1.1 α because of some minor pressing fixes. The release contains:

• a mkmap that can actually generate SVG maps from the MKM files,
• instructions on how to write MKM files.
• the first ever download here!

Choices: star maps versus doc?

Just now I'm pondering about redefining my release plan. The problem is that, as defined in the link, it requires me to generate all 88 modern constellations in order to reach alpha level, but that's not the usual meaning of "alpha level" in software development. Alpha usually means something that works but may have bugs, and also don't necessarily have all the planned facilities. Also: it is overdue to startup some kind of documentation – it's very fun (and funny) for me to sit here programming, but it's of no use to generate nifty star maps if others cannot use the program according to their wishes, or, perhaps take the code and modify it for other purposes. According to my opinion, there's a lot of free software out there having quite inferior documentation, that are failing just because of inferior documentation and nothing else. Gnome and other desktop systems on Linux have very clearly inferior documentation, documenting exactly what anyone with at least a little brains can infer without documentation. That s*x!!

Here another star map (the constellation Aquarius):

I'll be back!

R158 – road to α, step 2

Fixed the minus problem so to be able to draw southern hemisphere constellations:

• R158 (Apr 26, 2013): Implement negative constants

The problem was fixed by creating a rule:

⟨constexpr⟩ ::= ('+'|'-') ⟨numexpr⟩

by the function parse_constexpr. I was forced into accepting the idea of using token ** args to by side effects appoint constants.

R155–R157 – road to α, step 1

The project is approaching alpha, which is so defined that it is possible to generate maps for all 88 official Delporte-constellations. The goal isn't reached yet. Minus cannot be given in mkm-file constant number literals, which essentially impossibilizes¹) making southern hemisphere constellations.

• R155 (Apr 21, 2013): Minor fix to make mbf self selecting svg output moved many functions from mkmap.c to vmcode.c, inserted VM instruction for opening the output file,
• R156 (Apr 23, 2013): Functional null-parser, mkm revisions creation of parser compile-mkm.uc intended to compile new file orion-v1.mkm to maps/ori3.mbf,
• R157 (Apr 25, 2013): Compiler implemented, alpha stage soon to come semicompletion of compile-mkm.uc allowing northern hemisphere constellations to be compiled

¹) "impossibilizes" (makes impossible) is probably not legal English, but being a linganarchist, I made it up here to counterpart the Swedish quite legal "omöjliggör". Swedish is a little superior to English, so why fully adapt to the inferior language? Carl von Linné didn't invent binomial nomenclature by following Latin word formation rules, he applied the Swedish word composition rules on a Macaronic mixture of Greek and Latin.