metamorphs96/planeframe

Structural analysis of plane frame, using various programming and scripting languages. Suitable for sheds, carports and verandahs, treated as series of plane frames.

PlaneFrame

Structural analysis of plane frame, using various programming/scripting language and development environments. The basis of the program is the book: W. H. MosleyW. J. Spencer (1984),"Microcomputer Applications in Structural Engineering", Macmillan Press, London. The program in the book was written in a dialect of basic, my father translated to Turbo Pascal and added a graphical user interface. When I moved to 64 bit Windows 7, the orginal program would no longer run. Further more the version I had translated from Pascal to VBA, and was used in spreadsheet for carport and verandah design would no longer read the original data files. The original versions Pascal/VBA used arrays indexed from 1, to convert to vb.net I needed to convert the VBA version so arrays indexed from zero. The MS DOS based text and graphical user interface was removed from the Pascal version, to create a console application which accepted a command line parameter for the data file. The Pascal/Delphi/Lazarus versions of the program all reflect their origins with the original Turbo Pascal version of the program. All other versions were derived from the VBA version.

The program is written in different languages to illustrate that there is little difference between the calculation capabilties of the common programming languages and translating from one language to another is not all that difficult. So if have a manufactured structural product (MSP) and developers working on structural design tools, then making plane frame analysis available in their preferred language shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.