Project Retrospective

[robertapplin]

This issue has been created in retrospect to hint at possible improvements to the code within this project. These improvements could have included:

• Replacing this system call in some way.
• Using RAII when accessing files.
• Using a class object to implement an ErrorReporter which is initialized just before processing, and then gets destructed if an exception occurs thereby allowing an error message to be reported within the ErrorReporter destructor (an idea similar to the RAII concept), with the aim of improving code readability/tidiness.
• Pass std::size_t function parameters by const &. Although this has no compiler benefits as std::size_t is a base type, I think it would be better to use const & consistently for all standard library data types. As an exception, I think it would be ok to not pass by const & for built-in data types such as int, double, bool, etc.
• The files in the tools directory should be moved to a separate repository as they could be reused in separate projects. This would require a better understanding of CMake.
• Using python for the interface side of things would make more sense. It would allow easy access to packages such as matplotlib, which could have been useful for this project. Any intensive processing would remain in c++.

For a larger project it would also be important to use automated testing, and improve/add documentation.