[plt-scheme] 2htdp/image questions

On Apr 18, 2010, at 12:39 PM, Robby Findler wrote:

> The new library however is much more suited to shape-based manipulations of images.

Yes, I understand, and I'm very thankful for it.  But as written, it already treats bitmaps as one of the "atomic" kinds of images: if a student copies and pastes a photo from a Web browser and then rotates or scales it, the student will get somewhat jaggy results but not a type error.  And as written, it already needs to be able to render an arbitrary image into a bitmap (for display and equality, if nothing else).

I'm downright looking forward to doing the following demo in class: compare

(scale 5 5 (add-blue-gradient (triangle 10 "solid" "green")))
(add-blue-gradient (scale 5 5 (triangle 10 "solid" "green")))

and explain the difference.  I think this could be a "teachable moment", even for my non-majors.

Anyway, with the current design, I can write map-image and build-image and get-pixel to produce correct results without inventing a whole new data type.  I can probably even get map-image to be efficient.  But if build-image calls a user-provided function hundreds or thousands of times on the same image, and each of those calls invokes get-pixel a few times, and get-pixel starts by re-rendering the image, performance will really suck and Scheme will look like an utter joke next to Python.


I mentioned one solution: "the first time you need to render an image, cache the bitmap".  Perhaps another solution is to turn the "build-image" function I described into another node type in the shape data type.  A pixel-by-pixel transform can appear anywhere in a shape tree (although you might want to normalize it to the top, above overlays).  But I think that would be a more disruptive change, with more non-obvious implications, than the caching idea.


Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu