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62 lines
2.7 KiB
ReStructuredText
62 lines
2.7 KiB
ReStructuredText
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libMML
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======
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libMML is short for the library to the Mufasa Macro Library.
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Why libMML?
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-----------
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One of the first questions that rise are probably *why* libMML and *what* is
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libMML exactly?
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libMML is a loadable C-like library that provides most of the MML functionality.
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For the ones that do not know, MML is the core component for Simba that does all
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the *computational* and *algorithmic* work. See :ref:`mml-ref` for more
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information.
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To summarize, the MML covers:
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- Targetting specific windows and getting the window information such as
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their bitmaps and dimensions.
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- Controlling the mouse and keyboard.
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- Finding colours, bitmaps and dtms.
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- Text recognition (OCR)
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- Accessing files and sockets in an unified manner
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Hopefully the *what* part of the question has mainly been covered by now. If
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you're literate in computer science the *why* question has also been answered as
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soon as it was mentioned that is was a loadable library - which is also implied
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by its name. Exporting the MML into a loadable library allows virtually any
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program to load it and just use all the MML functionality.
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Design (issues)
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---------------
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libMML itself should not be too complex. It should simply translate the OOP MML
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to a non-OOP C-type library and convert datatypes when required (see below as to
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why). libMML is basically just a codebase that calls MML functions and passes
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the result along in a slightly different format. In simple cases such as
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MoveMouse the integers are simply passed; since there's do not differ, but in
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the case of arrays of any type we have to copy the arrays to a C format - at
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least until MML internally will no longer use Free Pascal (managed) arrays.
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As previously mentioned, libMML is a *C*-type library; this is mentioned
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explicitly because MML is written in Free Pascal (Object Pascal) which has quite
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a few different datatypes. Strings are typically not compatible, and arrays are
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managed in Pascal whereas they are not in C which makes it hard to just *pass*
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the array along. One of the problems we have to cope with when writing libMML is
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converting datatypes to C-compatible datatypes. C-compatible datatypes are
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supported by most programming languages and thus the best way to go when making
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a universal MML library.
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libMML use cases
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----------------
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Theoretically libMML can be loaded by any programming language; but typically
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each programming languages has it's own kind of programming practices and thus
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write - again - their own wrapper around libMML. This is what is being done with
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*pyMML*, the python libMML wrapper. It is still as much in development as libMML
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is, but the functionality exposed by libMML is succesfully used.
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