Re: Ping John Larkin

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:23:35 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


John Larkin wrote:


On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:20:35 -0700, "Robert" <bobh3141@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



John,

This recent post on what OOP is all about seems like something you'd be interested in:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.dylan/msg/26dc460a2a5b58b1

Since it confirms your opinion of the idiocy of Programmers. :)

Robert



Interesting. Clearly C and its derivatives are approaching obsolence.
They were designed for solving relatively small problems, on
resource-limited machines, authored by geniuses who hack maximally
cryptic code and don't look back.

He argues for more OOP languages, where modules pass messages
autonomously and presumably asynchronously.

How about this:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/headhunter/archives/2007/08/i_programmer.html

Completely the opposite, namely expressing programs not as procedures
to be executed all over the place, but as point state machines.

I love state-machines, in programs or in hardware. They are forced to
account for every possible system state, and, coded sensibly, have
absolutely known, finite resource needs and can't crash. Modern C
programming mostly reminds me of 1960's vintage async logic design, a
tangled heap of gates, flipflops, one-shots, 555's, rc's, and delay
lines, with no global clock in sight. The real screwups in modern
logic design happen when signals cross clock domains.

Cool link. Thanks.


Just curious: Do you guys use VBA for instrument control?


I suppose not, since I don't know what VBA is. OK, what *is* VBA?


Visual Basic for Applications. It comes with MS-Office but most people don't know it's there, and until recently that included myself. It allows you to plop down control and display elements pretty quickly with a few mouse clicks. Most of the time it seems to be done in Excel. IOW Excel then becomes the user interface but with enough control surfaces placed on the screen you might not realize that at first glance. The pre-cooked control elements have the typical appearance of those in most Windows programs but you can alter them, including pics, logos etc.

Right-clicking onto one of those control surfaces brings up the basic editor. Now you can program the details, what you want it to do or display, when, and so on. Seems pretty slick for distributing a user interface with the equipment because the customer wouldn't have to load any executables, just load your Excel file and allow macros to run.

Intuilink from Agilent is an example of such an Excel user interface:
http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5980-3115EN.pdf


We program our test stands in PowerBasic, and run them under DOS. Our
customers access our VME stuff at register level, with whatever
software they like, and we don't supply applications or drivers.

We are considering doing a bunch of Ethernet and PoE instruments, so I
suppose we'll have to use Windows or Linux at some point. The Windows
versions of PowerBasic actually do TCP/IP and UDP sort of stuff very
easily.


Don't know how VBA would fare there. RS232 is IMHO certainly not its strength. Been wrestling with it for a while but now a couple of customers called in more urgent stuff. So I'll get back to it later.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.