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Old June 18th 07, 04:29 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna
Richard Clark Richard Clark is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Jul 2006
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Default Antenna programming tool/language/compiler/preprocessor?

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:47:37 -0700, Richard Clark
wrote:

As I said, there's no reason why your work can't survive, my question
was why do you simply re-invent C, a language as dead to antenna
designers as Sanskrit?


For instance. Even C programmers (some) enjoy the benefit of structs
as a layer of abstraction. This is a pretty thin difference, but
certainly within furthering the scheme of antenna design. Why I say
that is that the NEC card deck is already a struct. To ignore the
card deck is a step backwards from antenna design to simply conform to
a programmer's model.

Further, taking the deck, you stand a better model with Pascal and
records. This gives the antenna designer a way to more fluently
describe and access segments, wires, or elements. It is a natural
progression. However, Pascal is hardly a symbolic language, except by
some of its own elements (the record). Abstracting further, LISP (a
decidedly intense symbolic language) is a chained and recursive
language (you say you've licked recursion) that mimics not only the
linear connections of wires, but the regress of arrays. However, I
wouldn't wish LISP on anyone as an antenna design language, but it is
certainly far more suitable than C.

All-in-all, each of these variants can still contain exactly what
you've offered in BNF.

In short, your expression syntax is not a language at all (not even
C). It is incomplete being only the phrase particles of many
languages. Phrases need to aggregate into clauses and then sentences.
You exhibit none of that.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC