THCcalc 1.2.1 review

THCcalc program was originally written for Un*x-type systems

License: Public Domain File size: 16K Developer: Eric Fenderson

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THCcalc program was originally written for Un*x-type systems. That current branch is still accessible and will occasionally be updated. This old code is in C and under a BSD license. This does not apply for the new code.

The program calculates the THC content in a person's blood based on their usage pattern over a specific period of time.

It is text based and menu driven at the moment. It will be both a command-line utility and an emacs package when finished. The new code is in LISP (currently common lisp only).

The old version of the code has several subtle bugs which should not affect usability but could cause an issue for some users. This is why I recommend the lisp version. Many Linux distributions come with a lisp interperter or can easily get one. When the emacs verion of the program is complete you should have no problem using this on any *nix system as emacs is "almost" universal.

This program will offer many advantages over the program it was written to replace (the original THC Calculator not the previous version of this code) including: date association, data files, database management, and daily output that can be used to drive a graph or other database. It can also be configured based on how paranoid a person is by lowering the cutoff rate or even the rate of decay.

Requirements:
To run this program you will need an implementation of Common Lisp. I am currently developing this using GNU Emacs, SLIME, and SBCL. Although none of these are needed for the program to run. At the very least you need one implementation (which does not need to be SBCL). A common one, which I use frequently from the command line, is CLisp which runs on many operating systems and is easy to install and use. I have made the choice to not use it for development because it does not play very nice with SLIME.
It does not matter, really, which you choose. If you want to develop this program you do not need SLIME or Emacs to work on it. You can use whichever tools suit your style.

Please note: The version that currently exists is something you can use with as a daily thing if you want. It is not very forgiving at the moment (and might dump you into the debugger if -- for example -- you input a bad file name) but it does work.

This code can do a dump in a format acceptable to most spreadsheet programs, like the old version -- so you can print a graph if you want using openoffice or whatever. The emacs part still needs to be written which should not be very time consuming, IF everything goes well.

Depending on your browser, you might need to right click on the file and use "save as." .

What's New in This Release:
More complete date validation functionality was added to the program.