[Haskell-cafe] ANN: mecha-0.0.1

[Luke Palmer]

Neat!  What a cool idea.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Tom Hawkins <tomahawkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mecha is a little solid modeling language intended for machine design.
>  Mecha has two layers: a pure functional layer for defining solids
> (aka. parts), and a monadic layer for arranging parts into assemblies.
>  Solids (parts) are built using set operations on solid primitives.  A
> solid primitives is simply a predicate that says whether a point in
> space is inside the solid:
>
> data Solid = Solid (Vector -> Bool)

With a type like this, how is it possible to make solids without hard edges?

> Mesh generation is performed by adaptive marching cubes.
>
> It's slow, especially if you don't have graphics hardware.  And solids
> with hard edges don't render very clean.  But the basics work.
>
> Here's a simple example:
>
> example :: IO ()
> example = view design
>
> design :: Asm ()
> design = do
>  a <- part 1   0.06 8 $ difference sphereCube cyl3
>  b <- part 1   0.08 8 $ sphereCube
>  c <- part 1.5 0.08 8 $ cyl3
>  color (0, 0, 0.8) $ place a
>  move (-4, 0, 0) $ color (0.8, 0, 0) $ place b
>  move ( 0, 4, 0) $ color (0, 0.8, 0) $ place c

Why did you choose a monadic interface?  Is there a technical or
semantic problem with a statement like:

design =
    let a = part 1 0.06 8 $ difference sphereCube cyl3
        b = part 1 0.08 8 $ sphereCube
        c = part 1.5 0.08 8 $ cyl3
    in mconcat [ color (0, 0, 0.8) a
               , move (-4, 0, 0) . color (0.8, 0, 0) $ b
               , move (0, 4, 0) . color (0, 0.8, 0) $ b
               ]

Luke