🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26...@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> gar...@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Bradford Garton) writes:
>This is interesting to me -- Does anyone know of any other applications
>using the auditory modality for 'research' like this?  There was much
>discussion about Feigenbaum, et. al.'s use of computer graphics imaging
>to see patterns in chaotic systems... it seems to me that the sonic domain
>would be an excellent place to check for periodicities which might otherwise
>go unnoticed.

A few years ago I wrote a program to display the lexical scoping of Pascal
programs.  In doing so I had to write a parser that could read and understand
Pascal syntax.  While debugging the parser I got tired of sitting and watching
the display as it spit out token after token, waiting for it to hang up - its
usual way of crashing.  I first tried just beeping the pc's speaker as each
token was parsed but at 20 or so tokens a second, that was too monontanous.
I ended up summing the ascii value of the characters of each token and using
that for the frequency of each beep.  The result was an amazing cacophony
of sound.  At first hearing it seemed totaly random, but if you paid 
attention you could hear patterns as the same tokens were used repeatedly
within a procedure or function.  This became so much fun that I added an
option to slow down the parse when generating the audio signal so that each
tone could be heard.

A larger suprise came when I began analyzing other people's code.  There was
a program I had written with two other people, about 10,000 line of code.  I
got so that I could listen to the audio signature of the code being parsed and
identify which of the three of us had written that piece of code.  What is
worse is that one of the programmers was not very good and his code sounded
very chaotic.  My code (average quality) sounded ok, but the third person
wrote very elegant code and the audio signiture of her code reflected that.

What it suggested is that good code not only runs well, is easily maintained,
but also sounds good!

					Andrew MacRae