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Known Concerns

• The original authors' reliance on global variables is very troubling. While the overall architecture of the system is sound, the use of global variables allows for unforseen, subtle and potentially problematic interactions to occur. It would be nice to move the use of global variables to a more object-orientedish encapsulation. It's understandable that callbacks will need to use variables that are not parameters or local to the callback. However, that is not enough of a reason to violate/ignore encapsulation. We have started to slowly add more encapsulation to the program.

• In menu.c, X Windows determines its response to a menu choice by the physical position of the choice in the menu. The translation from menu position to action is rather ugly because it is context sensitive: If the position of a menu item moves or if an addition is made, several places need to maintain that ordering information. This problem has been addressed for the stand features menu. The change needs to occur for the other menus as well so that items can be moved around in the menu independently of their callback handlers' order.

• Some of the type names do not correspond to their actual duties. TreeList is an example since it's really the stand data where the stand contains a linked list of trees whose type is called Node. Some names could use an overhaul.

• Several of the fields in the TREE_TYPE struct aren't used. Of course, this relates to dead code/dead variable problems noted earlier in the document.

• There is dead code throughout the source files. It would be useful to trim the dead code from the source files. One tool that would be extremely helpful in identifying dead code is built by Rational. Alas it is quite expensive.

• The width of viewing area a slightly lower than it should be. The problem that this introduces is that, periodically, sections of the very edges of the Forest View will not paint. There will be ``jagged edges'' and areas that are not drawn on the screen. These areas are very small but this problem still occurs.

• Collision detection with the ground is not implemented. Thus you can end up under the ground.

• The num lock, caps lock and scroll lock keys must be off. If any are on, the mouse clicks will not register since X cares about things like shift key, ctrl key, num lock, etc. when reading input. It would be nice if the application made sure that these three are off.