In this paper we describe a Python- and Tkinter-based visual-programming environment called ViPEr. This tool enables non-programmers to build computational and visualization networks interactively. Computational nodes can be placed onto a canvas and their input and output ports can be connected using the mouse. The connections between the nodes define a directed graph that will be used to propagate data and trigger the execution of nodes that have new input data. ViPEr is, in appearance, similar to programs such as AVS [Upson et al. 89] from Advanced Visual Simulations Inc, or OpenDX [DX 93] from IBM, but presents some fundamental differences which will be pointed out throughout this paper. Several examples of applications will be used to illustrate ViPEr’s design and current range of capabilities.
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Answers to \Which programming language is the best?” can ignite fierce arguments among zealots who see no reason for any language other than the one they use. Fortunately, most programmers do not hold such extreme opinions, and often would like to see a rational evaluation of different languages from which they can draw their own opinions. Many researchers have proposed methods for comparing and evaluating languages 2, 9, 10], but they tend to focus more on the languages than on the needs of language users. Although languages are intrinsically worthy of study, their real purpose is as tools in problem solving.
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Nowadays, transacting business through E-commerce platform has become an important business trading way in modern society. E-commerce has been applied to literally every aspect of our society. The requirements of users are variable, different methods are in need of realizing E-commerce, even the deployment platforms are different. The JSP, ASP, HTML and other traditional scripting language has become unable to meet the needs of designing a complex system, even if it has been realized, the coupling between codes, the configuration environment and system deployment dependency fall far short of various requirements of users. It is a highly skilled work which demands good conception of beauty and much professional knowledge of the program designers. However, it is difficult to fulfill the needs in reality.
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Tagging is an important way for users to succinctly describe the content they upload to the Internet. However, most tag-suggestion systems recommend words that are highly correlated with the existing tag set, and thus add little information to a user’s contribution. This paper describes a means to determine the ambiguity of a set of (user-contributed) tags and suggests new tags that disambiguate the original tags. We introduce a probabilistic framework that allows us to find two tags that appear in different contexts but are both likely to co-occur with the original tag set. If such tags can be found, the current description is considered “ambiguous” and the two tags are recommended to the user for further clarification. In contrast to previous work, we only query the user when information is most needed and good suggestions are available. We verify the efficacy of our approach using geographical, temporal and semantic metadata, and a user study. We built our system using statistics from a large (100M) database of images and their tags.
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Many software developers are attracted to the idea of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) but unsure about how to begin using the technology. They recognize the concept of crosscutting concerns, and know that they have had problems with the implementation of such concerns in the past. But there are many questions about how to adopt AOP into the development process.
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We present a purely functional implementation of the computational differentiation tools — the well known numeric (i.e., not symbolic) techniques which permit one to compute point-wise derivatives of functions defined by computer programs economically and exactly (with machine precision). We show how the use of lazy evaluation permits a transparent and elegant construction of the entire infinite tower of derivatives of higher order for any expressions present in the program. The formalism may be useful in various problems of scientific computing which often demand a hard and ungracious human preprocessing before writing the final code. Some concrete examples are given.
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CGI scripts enable dynamic generation of HTML pages. This paper describes how to write CGI scripts using Tcl. Many people use Tcl for this purpose already but in an ad hoc way and without realizing many of the more non-obvious benefits. This paper reviews these benefits and provides a framework and examples. Canonical solutions to HTML quoting problems are presented. This paper also discusses using Tcl for the generation of different formats from the same document. As an example, FAQ generation in both text and HTML are described.
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There are many distinct pleasures associated with computer programming. Craftsman-ship has its quiet rewards, the satisfaction that comes from building a useful object and making it work. Excitement arrives with the flash of insight that cracks a previously intractable problem. The spiritual quest for elegance can turn the hacker into an artist. There are pleasures in parsimony, in squeezing the last drop of performance out of clever algorithms and tight coding.
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