March 2, 1993

This directory contains a number of documents that should be of help
to people who would like to use Zeus for animating programs.

Please keep in mind that we haven't "officially" released Zeus; we are
not actively encouraging people to program using it. On the other
hand, there are many sophisticated folks who have indicated that
they'd like to try it out, even in its current form.

The problem is not that the system is flakey or missing key features.
The problem is simply a lack of coherent documentation. (Yes, it is on
our todo list, along with ....)

The system was used extensively at SRC last summer as part of the "1st
Annual SRC Algorithm Animation Festival". The animations that were
done as part of that project are availabe in the "mentor" package.
The mentor man page give more information about the examples.

This directory contains two SRC Research Reports plus a draft of a
Zeus programmer's tutorial. Report 75 describes Zeus at a pretty
high-level. The system has evolved considerably since then, but the
big picture is the same. Report 76a describes some of the techniques
we've developed for using color and sound in algorithm animations.
The Tutorial was written by Marc Najork at the University of Illinois.
Marc used Zeus while he was a research intern at SRC during the summer
of '92. The tutorial are notes that he prepared for a compiler course
being taught by Sam Kamin at Illinois that will be letting students
use Zeus for the course project.

If you don't like reading documentation and just want to copy some
working code and start modifying, the best code to copy is the
mentor-binpack package. The README file there gives an overview of
each of the source files. They exercise all of the common ways to ways
to program with Zeus. You should also look at the various Zeus
interfaces (ZeusPanel.i3, Zeus.i3, Algorithm.i3, and View.i3). Those
are documented extensively.

Marc H. Brown
mhb@src.dec.com
