ctre

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              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!