[pet] PET style guide proposal

[Mülner, Helmut]

Hello Bernd,

 > this sounds interesting, although up to now we were quite content
 > with cygwin/gcc compilability under Windows.

I work at a Research Organization where developers use whatever
platform is best for the research project. Most of my work was for
the Windows platform, so I know that best. I also was involved in the
development of software solutions for Brockhaus, Duden, Langenscheidt
and Bertelsmann.

I got interested in pet because we have a research project "Web of Data"
(http://www.joanneum.at/?id=2868&L=0), where I evaluated some technologies
and developed a named entity extraction module for web pages as a first step
to automatically linking data to Linked Open Data.

 > There have lots of changes been done recently, so it would be good
 > to know what version it was that you branched from.

I used "main".

 > I see several advantages as well as potential problems adding your
 > code as another branch to PET. From my view, the good things are:

 > - another potential developer aboard
I cannot guarantee longterm professional (i.e. payed by a research project) involvement,
but it looks like pet could become one of my favorite hobbies.

 > - more compatibility with Windows (although one could argue if that's a
 >   good thing :))

You can afford to ignore 89% (or so) of personal computers?

 > - general code improvement using available libraries

Agreed.

 > Problems:
 > - We are a small community, and therefore we try to keep with a single
 >    strand of development as far as possible.

As far as I can tell you are a minority in a small community because you use
C++ and not Lisp.

I find the research and the resullts of the last 20 year of computer linguistics
very interesting and regret it, that this area seams to be somewhat isolated
from the rest of computer science/industry.

 >    Currently, we're in the
 >    process of getting back to a single main branch. A new branch that
 >    differs considerably from the main line but is preferred by some
 >    people just because of OS considerations might draw away resources
 >    that we desperately need for overall improvement

Of course you could consider my changes a part of the implementation of
the new style quide proposal and use it as the new main branch :-)

Part of the improvements should by more tests. (BTW I prefer boost::test.)
I am interested in making goofy into a useful tool.

 > I'd really like to know what others would think about the addition of the
 > code to the central repository.

Me too.

Best,
                Helmut