Software Tools

The program has been developed on a GNU/Linux system (Originally Redhat 6.1 and now SuSE 8.1), and could not have been done without all the work that everyone has put in over the years into making this into a fully functional and powerful development environment. Below I mention specific packages that I've used extensively, but my heartfelt thanks must go to everyone who, over the years, has contributed to the Open Source software movement

Development was on the powerful combination of three wonderful products from the Free Software Foundation

emacs for editing code, data and documentation;
gcc to compile the interpreter;
and gdb for when it was necessary to do serious debugging.

Not only that, I've made extensive use of their excellent libraries:

interactive input for testing is handled using readline;
the regular expression library regex handles searching for names;
and all the graphics are generated using plotutils.

I've found memwatch a very useful tool for tracking down memory leaks and reassuring myself that nothing nasty was happening.

I'm now using CVS version control software cvs which I'd recommend to anyone doing a large programming/data management project. The ability to go back to previous versions, and to keep snapshots of the project at each release has saved me from disaster more than once.

Once I've created a new button I need to make its shadow (blue) version. I found giftrans by Andreas Ley and available at multiple download sites a really nice tool for this sort of thing

The final credit must go to Microsoft. If their software wasn't such a resource hog, it wouldn't be possible to get the hardware for a perfectly respectable unix workstation so cheaply, just because it can't run the latest web browser or whatever. Indeed, for many months the whole site was being served from a machine salvaged from a rubbish bin