CTRE
/sitro/
distributed revision control
implemented in regular expressions
see ws10.pdf for the theory, or
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1832772.1832777#
FILES
ctre.js - revision control engine
test.html - ctre.js in-browser tests
demo4.html - ctre.js hello-world demo
dhyt.js - web browser (HTML) bridge
PRINCIPLES
The technical agenda of the project is to
achieve real-time collaborative editing
features (Etherpad, Google Wave) together
with the ability of distributed revision
control (like in the git), branches etc.
The vision behind the technical details is
the idea of deep hypertext, whose roots go
all the way back to 60s and even 40s when
such great thinkers as Vannevar Bush and
Theodor Holm Nelson dreamed up lots of
exciting stuff. With the deep hypertext, a
user is able to address particular pieces
in a changing text, compare revisions and
retrieve past versions, etc etc.
The theory that connects the vision and
the technical agenda is quite original.
It is a proposed successor to the unholy
Operational Transformations herecy, named
Causal Trees. The mainstay of the CT is
that every character has an identity.
Those characters are assembled into a text
using a scheme based on some relativistic
space-time cause-effect concepts. Read
the article for the details.
A spicy detail is that most (if not all)
heavylifting is done by regexes, regular
expressions. Parsing, mutating, searching,
everything. Actually, vanilla regexes grew
too monstrous over time, so I (gritzko)
have introduced a macro language on top
of regexes to write my formulas.
That is a very special sort
of witchcraft&wizardry,
so read, hack and
ENJOY!