Banate CAD Documentation

Installation

As Visualization and Design systems go, Banate CAD is not that large of a system, but as small and easy as things may be, it does require some amount of documentation.  Herein you will find links to a growing amount of documentation.  At first, what you see here would be considered “Reference Manual”.  What will follow on would be considered “User Manual”.

To get started, Banate CAD is a text based Visualization system.  As such, you use script files to actually get anything displayed on the screen.  This is similar to the OpenScad program, or even what you do with JavaScript.  Although it is possible to put a nice graphically based skin on top of the core system, that is not the current design center.

The core scripting language is Lua.  As scripting languages are concerned, Lua is fairly minimal.  It does follow in the footsteps of traditional ‘C’ syntax based languages, but it is a dynamic scripting language, much like Python, or Ruby.  Lua itself only has a few key data types:

number – Represented by a ‘double’, has plenty of size and precision to deal with anything in the graphics environment

bool – Nice for performing logical operations, including branching control

string – Technically, a table of characters, but has some key features of its own

table – The core data type.  Everything that’s not a number or bool, is a table

function – functions are first class citizens.  They can be easily passed around to functions as parameters, as easily as tables and numbers

And that’s about it.  The table is the key data type for language extension.  You can construct “classes” if you like that style of programming, or you can just create flat functions, like in a typical ‘C’ style application.  One of the benefits of scripting is that you don’t have to do memory management, as you do in ‘C’.  Since memory management has probably led to the most number of bugs in C programs over the decades, it is good to not have to deal with that.

Scripts are typically created with the ‘.fab’ file extension.

Core

Language Skins

Scene Builder

GLSL Skin


6 Comments on “Banate CAD Documentation”

  1. [...] Banate CAD Documentation Language Skinning → [...]

  2. [...] ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of [...]

  3. [...] ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of applying [...]

  4. [...] ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of [...]

  5. [...] ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of applying [...]

  6. [...] ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of applying [...]


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