Autocoding project proposal.

[Fernando Pérez]

I'm gonna regret posting here, I suspect ...
 
> there is the stand alone version of one ofthe commands
> 
> http://www.mindspring.com/~timrue/python/
> 
> IQ version 0.351 which does make use of some of the facets of the
> other 8 commands.

Ok, maybe it's just that we're all too dense here for your genius. So
please bear with us simple minds. Nobody so far seems to be able to know
exactly what you're after, so please show some summary of input and results
of your code so we can understand what's going on.

Yes, I know you already gave a pointer to code, which is a good first step.
It shows you care enough about this to have gotten it off the ground and
that's great. Problem is: you talk about a lot of abstraction, yet the file
you mention above is a *single 500 line chunk* without a single function
definition for chrissakes! Is that your idea of abstraction? You've thrown
in command line parsing with help messages with i/o with the core of
whatever it is you're doing, in one big salad bowl. That code is utterly,
absolutely incomprehensible to anyone but someone willing to spend quite
some time to go through it in thorough detail. You don't define *one*
single function, *one* single class. Nada. Zilch.

So either you're going to seduce enough people with the results of that
code that there will be interest in diving in and cleaning it up (very
possible, I've done that in the past with messy code whose results were
important enough to me) or you'll have to make that code digestible first.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I really hope your project (whatever it is)
succeeds, if nothing else for your personal satisfaction. But I'm pointing
to you some things which I suspect are a huge hurdle to its acceptance
right now.

Best of luck,

f.