lazy (?) evaluation, request for advice

[Tres Seaver]

In article <006001bf5839$ade66180$c02b2bc1 at martelli>,
Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote:

<snip timbot's underappreciated "you-want-advice-with-your-irony?">

>Grown-ups, too, appreciate convenience -- which, inter alia,
>means "appropriate level[s] of simplicity/power trade-off[s]".
>
>Rather than offering just one (rich, powerful, complex) way
>to express deal selection, I would prefer to offer users the
>convenience of choosing different points along the curve of
>power vs simplicity according to current needs -- from just
>clicking a few radiobuttons on a GUI, to entering a plain and
>simple selection expression about one hand, all the way to
>subclassing the deal-generator class to tweak and customize

I think maybe you've hit it on the head here -- put the effort into the
expression builder GUI, so that the only time they need to enter the
expression by hand, the additional effort of using object notation may
actually pay off in increased clarity (e.g., 'north.points() > 16 and
south.losers() > 5').  If your GUI generates the expression, and they
can see the result, they get to learn by example anyway.

Sounds like a fun project (I'm back twiddling my Delphi IRC poker client
again this morning),

Tres.
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Tres Seaver           tseaver at palladion.com       713-523-6582
Palladion Software    http://www.palladion.com