[seqfan] Programs on the wiki (was Re: author field)

[hv at crypt.org]

Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse at case.edu> wrote:
:I would like to see better coding of programs, though.  For many
:languages, though, it's not easy: there are programs in particular
:language dialects, and it's not clear whether they would run in other
:dialects or not.  Also many languages do not have a standard form --
:just search for variants on VB for an example.  (Maybe I should try to
:find the spreadsheet with my results!)

I have felt heavily constrained in the past when submitting programs
by the desire to fit the code within a reasonable number of lines in the
current text format. To this end I have tended to compress the code I
actually used myself very heavily, often resulting in something much
more obfuscatory than I would ever willingly write.

One of the benefits of moving to the wiki is that we can very easily
(choose to) move larger programs off to their own pages, and add just
a link to the sequence page. This will mostly remove the constraint,
and open the door to well-written and well-documented code.

I believe that the move to the wiki will among other benefits make it far
easier to collaborate effectively on computational aspects, and I'm greatly
looking forward to that.

Hugo