Exceptional coding style

[Rob T]

On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 06:05:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> That's not quite true, you know. Binary diffing has been around 
> for a
> long time now. But I suppose you could say that there is 
> currently no
> effective, generic way to display binary diffs in an 
> understandable way.
> But then, I believe git has diff plugins that one could write 
> custom
> diff displayers for, so this is merely a small impediment, not a
> fundamental one.
>

Better than using binary files would be to store the state of the 
system using text (json, xml, whatever). For correct visual 
representation as intended by the programmer, the state of the 
visual representation is loaded up when the graphical editor is 
launched.

A nice thing about a graphical representation of code, is that 
the execution can be animated for much better feedback and 
debugging abilities.

> Whatever structures said methods may use, can ultimately be 
> reduced to
> some kind of linear representation, which in turn can be 
> reduced to some
> text representation. I mean, no matter what you do, it will 
> ultimately
> have to be stored as a sequence of binary bytes. And 
> programmers like
> getting to the bottom of things, so directly manipulating a text
> representation is the most obvious approach.

True.

This is interesting, and it maps to text based source code.

SAM - An Animated 3D Programming Language (PDF)
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1.7976&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[...]
> Lilypond file and spell out notes and stuff directly, most 
> people would
> prefer a graphical interface where you can manipulate the 
> musical
> notation directly instead. Trying to write highly-polyphonic 
> music
> interspersed with chords in plain text format is possible, but 
> extremely
> painful and tedious, whereas writing it out in musical notation 
> is
> almost trivially straightforward. I've no idea what the 
> programming
> analogue of musical notation would be, though.  (Please don't 
> say APL.

Not exactly music, and not a general purpose 3D programming 
language but this is somewhat interesting (and annoying!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0hbfvNKWQ