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Some quick notes on the code. Planets is written entirely in OCaml, a
functional language developed at INRIA, a variant on ML. OCaml has a lot of
nice features---the compiled code runs at near-C speeds, it has type
inference, which means you need very few type declarations, which makes it
terser and easier to read. And it is statically typed, which means that it
catches a lot of errors at compile time rather than run time. And the
compilers themselves are lightning fast compared to gcc.
OCaml, however, has one big misfeature: it's unusual, and it's hard for
someone who has never used it before to get use to the programming style.
But OCaml is great language, so it could well be worth learing.
Here's a list of the different modules and what they do.
state.ml
contains basic type definitions and holds the variables containing the
state. This includes things like the definitions of vector operations.
physics.ml
Contains the basic physics, including computing the action of bodies on
each other and a simple algorithm for collision detection and handling.
Some of the actual code is really implemented in fast_physics.ml, which is
where the physics code is moved to when it's optimized and made grungy.
display.ml
This is the user interface. It has a bunch of kinky stuff for setting up
things like the placement of a new planet. You probably don?t want to
look at it for a while. But it also contains some important and easy to
modify stuff, including the key bindings, and the constants determining
how many iterations are done per display cycle, and how long the display
cycle is.
options.ml
This is somewhat hairy, so newbies beware. This is the code for
implementing the little box containing the listing of configuration
variables. The core data type here is a live value, which is just an
class wrapping a value such that callbacks are invoked whenever the value
is updated. These callbacks are used to update the display when
configuration options are changed from outside the display, and to update
the simulation when the configuration options are changed.
Also contained in here is GUI code for generating the various kinds of
displays required for the differnent options. There is much
object-and-inheritance stuff going on, which is always hard to understand.
collision.ml
This code has all the raw material for the "true collision" mode.
Basically it knows how to play billiards. The only function called by
other modules is one that takes as its argument a sequence of planets and
a time interval, and computes the motion, collisions and bounces that
would happen assuming all host's velocities stay constant. This is done
by repeatedly computing the next collision, moving the time forward to
when that happens, and the computing how that collision causes planets to
bounce. This is repeated until there are no further collisions in the
time period.
common.ml
Contains a few definitions that are used in lots of places, primarily the
debugging information.
constants.ml
A couple of physics constants that need to be accessed in a few different places.
fast_physics.ml
Contains the faster array-based implementation of some of the physics
primitives. Full of lots of not-very-functional code.
fqueue.ml
A simple functional queue implementation used to store planet traces
saveState.ml:
Code for loading and saving universe files. This is a tad more
sophisticated than your average flat config file --- it uses the ocaml
Genlex module to generating a lexer, which in turn allows for a pretty
flexible and readable file format.
help.ml:
Code for initial help window.
lstrings.ml:
Localization. Basically, it contains a bunch of functions (english,
danish, etc.) that provide translations from certain polymorphic variants
(i.e., `save or `load) to the appropriate string in the appropriate
language. One of those functions is chosen at run-time as the one to
actually use.
augMap.ml, augSet.ml:
simple, augmented versions of the Set and Map modules. The main
improvement is that these keep track of their size, so that getting the
number of elements is not linear.
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