LANGUAGES

The two major languages used are C and a graphical extension of Pico. C is used to address a number of issues involving the mapping of graphical entities onto low level machine representations (essentially in lectures 1 & 7). Pico is used as an executable pseudocode to perform the detailed specification of a series of geometrical algorithms.

C

We will stick to ANSI C meaning that the code that is provided should be compilable on any platform. However - the bitmap code from lecture 1 supposes the presence of a VGA graphics card while the quadtree code from lecture 7 supposes that the machine in question is a Macintosh.
 

PICO

We will be using a graphical extension of Pico based on the original Pico. The syntax is slightly different and more sophisticated (to enhance readability) and a set of simple 2D primitives is provided. As an example we include code and screen dump for the entry of a polygon:

 The output from this program is: