Ipemake

The most interesting challenge in writing IPE, from a programming standpoint at least, was the program Ipemake, which takes a simple ASCII description of a program's parameters, produces the XView code necessary to display a panel containing the parameters, and convert those panel objects into values in a parameter file. To illustrate the action of Ipemake, suppose I have simple program ``Myprog'' that has just one parameter named ``param''. Here is the ASCII parameter description file:

And here is part of the actual code produced by Ipemake:

This part of the code creates the panel containing Myprog's parameters. Ipemake also generates the subroutine that builds the parameter file for Myprog:

And the subroutine that constructs the part of the final command string pertaining to Myprog:

In my first pass at installing IPE, I've supported twelve different programs. From a total of 125 lines of parameter description files, Ipemake has generated a total of 2205 lines of C code, as well as 120 lines of include files. It's clear that without Ipemake, I wouldn't have had the patience to write the code to support even these twelve programs. With Ipemake, I did it in a couple of hours.