suggestions for new module name
- From: "Michael Hendricks" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 21 Jun 2005 19:13:11 -0700
I've got a module with the working title Text::Effort. It calculates
roughly how much physical effort is required to type a given text. I
wasn't able to find any modules on CPAN that did this, but most of the
text statistics modules seem to be under the Text namespace. Does
anyone have a suggestion for a name better than Text::Effort?
The current documentation for the module is below.
Thanks for any input,
Michael
---------------
NAME
Text::Effort - calculate the effort required to type a given text
SYNOPSIS
use Text::Effort qw/effort/;
my $effort = effort("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
dog");
$effort will be a hashref something like this
$effort = {
characters => 43, # the number of characters in the text
presses => 44, # key presses need to type the text
distance => 950, # millimeters the fingers moved while
typing
energy => 2.2..., # the energy (Joules) used while typing
};
DESCRIPTION
Text::Effort is used to calculate how much physical effort was
required
to type a given text. Several metrics of effort are used. These
metrics
are described in detail in the "METRICS" section.
This module is useful for determining which keyboard layout is more
efficient, for making API/language design decisions, or to show
your
boss how hard you're working.
FUNCTIONS
effort $TEXT | \$TEXT
The parameter should be a scalar or a reference to a scalar which
contains the text to be analyzed. Leading whitespace on each line
of
$TEXT is ignored since a decent text editor handles that for the
typist.
Only characters found on a standard US-104 keyboard are tallied in
the
metrics. That means that accented characters, unicode, etc. are not
included. If a character is unrecognized, it will be silently
ignored.
effort %PARAMETERS
effort() may also be called with a list of named parameters. This
allows
more flexibility in how the metrics are calculated. Below is a list
of
acceptable (or required) parameters.
text
file
One of these two options must be specified. If neither is
specified,
effort() will "die". The value of text should be a scalar or
reference to a scalar containing the text to analyze. The value
of
file should be a filehandle which is open for reading or a file
name.
layout
Default: qwerty
This parameter specifies the keyboard layout to use when
calculating
metrics. The value of layout should be either 'qwerty' or
'dvorak'.
If a value different from those is specified, the default value
of
'qwerty' is used.
Calling effort like: "effort($text)" is identical to calling it
like
this
effort(
text => $text,
layout => 'qwerty',
);
METRICS
characters
The number of recognized characters in the text. This is similar in
spirit to the Unix command "wc -c". Only those characters which are
encoded in the internal keyboard layout will be counted. That
excludes
accented characters, Unicode characters and control characters but
includes newlines.
presses
The number of keys pressed when typing the text. The value of this
metric is the value of the characters metric plus the number of
times
the Shift key was pressed.
distance
The distance, in millimeters, that the fingers travelled while
typing
the text. This distance includes movement required for the Shift
and
Enter keys, but does not include the vertical movement the finger
makes
as the key descends during a press. Perhaps a better name for this
metric would be horizontal_distance, but that's too long ;-)
The model for determining this metric is very simplistic. It
assumes
that a finger moves from its home position to the destination key
and
then returns to the home position before moving on to the next key.
Of
course, this is not how people actually type, but the model should
result in an upper-bound for the amount of finger movement.
energy
The number of Joules of energy required to type the text. This
metric is
the most inclusive in that it tries to accomodate the values of
both the
presses and the distance metrics into a single metric. However,
this
metric is also the least accurate at modeling the real world. The
calculations are roughly based upon the *The Compendium of Physical
Activities* (or rather hearsay about it's contents since I don't
have a
copy).
The physical charactersistics of the keyboard are assumed to be
roughly
in line with ISO 9241-4:1998, which specifies standards for such
things.
SEE ALSO
Tactus Keyboard article on the mechanics and standards of keyboard
design - <http://www.tactuskeyboard.com/keymech.htm>
AUTHOR
Michael Hendricks, <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
TODO
* Add an 'accumulator' option which allows effort() to add it's
results
to those from a previous call to effort().
* Count the unrecognized characters
* Allow keyboard layouts other than QWERTY and Dvorak
* Allow keyboards other than US-104
* Add options for specifying the characteristics of the keyboard
such as
key displacement and the force required to depress the keys.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2005 by Michael Hendricks
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or,
at
your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.
.
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