Dismal (Dis’ Mode Ain’t Lotus) is a spreadsheet program. It is designed to be used within the GNU Emacs editor (See Description of Dismal for GNU Emacs) and was developed to support sequential data (protocol) analysis.
Dismal was developed by David Fox and Frank Ritter as part of their thesis work, and is offered as is. It is also copylefted, meaning that you are provided with the full source code, and agree to provide free copies to others. This also means that it is not fully supported. Several people have passed back comments, bug reports and bug fixes (most notably Erik Altmann, David Lamkins, and Robert J. Chassell), and these improvements have greatly added to Dismal. There are currently over 20 known bugs or limitations to Dismal’s features. These can be found in the manual or in the front of the source code, which is freely downloadable (See Main Page).
Dismal is an extendible mode which allows users to write their own functions which can be implemented within the spreadsheet. This also makes it flexible enough to be driven by other programs, such as a cognitive model. Dismal is written in Emacs lisp and since the GNU-Emacs’ lisp interpreter is immediately available, extensions and modifications can be realised simply and directly.
Dismal, like other spreadsheet programs, manipulates and performs calculations from data contained in cells. As it is easily accessible from a UNIX environment it is very easy to transfer data collected automatically and analyse it from within Dismal. Becuase the software is still being developed, it means that bugs can be sent in and they will be fixed. Whereas there will be more bugs in this than in a normal spreadsheet package, any errors can be quickly and efficiently fixed.
Return to the main Dismal Page.
These pages were created by Matthew Hardy and are on the Nottingham University Web Site.
The URL for this page is http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~mrh96c/uid/intro.html
My email address is [email protected].
This page was last updated on the 12/11/1997.