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onecan edited this page Jun 14, 2014 · 4 revisions

Welcome to Complex Paint.

About

The Complex Paint project is part of a larger effort to reverse engineer and recode a set of programs originally written for Mac OS9 that are useful for learning about fractals.

Complex Paint is a program that allows one to "graph" using the complex numbers. Since such a thing is not possible in the conventional sense without rare and presumably expensive 4D graph paper, Complex Paint displays the domain in one plot, and the range in another.

Use

At the moment, there are some quirks to using Complex Paint. Some of these are minor bugs that will be resolved in future versions, but for now, please be aware of the following:

  • The function box does not support multiplication of the form (arg1)(arg2) Instead, please use an operator: (arg1)*(arg2)
  • Complex Paint reads a number of the form a+bi as two separate numbers, a and bi. Order of operations apply, so you can simply put parenthesis around your number (a+bi) to fix this.
  • Complex Paint may parse your negative signs incorrectly nuless you enclose negative numbers in parenthesis. An expression of the form N*(-1) should be parsed correctly, while N*-1 may not be parsed correctly.
  • The capital letters A-Z are reserved for variables. We trust that 26 variables will be enough for the needs of most people.
  • Variables may be set to arbitrary expressions. However, at the moment, there is no circular dependency checking. Therefore, please avoid making a variable a function of itself, since that may cause infinite loops and other such unpleasant phenomena.
  • Pi is input as pi, and e is input as e.
  • If you encounter a bug, it would be nice of you to report it in the issues tracker.
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