Eukleides Reference Manual

Table of Contents

Introduction

This manual describes the second version of the Eukleides language, as implemented in the eukleides 1.5.4 interpreter. The first version of the language was implemented in eukleides up to 1.0, which is not developed any longer. Even though both versions have rather close designs, there is no backwards compatibility.

Eukleides is a computer language devoted to elementary plane geometry. It aims to be a fairly comprehensive system to create geometric figures, either static or dynamic. It allows one to handle basic types of data: numbers and strings, as well as geometric types of data: points, vectors, sets (of points), lines, circles, and conics.

A Eukleides script usually consists in a declarative part where objects are defined, and a descriptive part where objects are drawn. Nonetheless, Eukleides is also a full featured programming language, providing conditional and iterative structures, user defined functions, modules, etc. Hence, it can easily be extended.

The Eukleides distribution provides two distinct interpreters: eukleides and euktopst, and three shell scripts: euktoeps, euktotex, and euktopdf. The former interpreter produces Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). The later, which is run by the scripts, produces TeXable PSTricks macros. The euktoeps script is an alternative to eukleides when mathematics typesetting is required. The two other scripts are useful when using Eukleides together with LaTeX.

The first version of Eukleides came with a graphical user interface (GUI) named xeukleides, allowing to create and view interactive figures. A GUI for the second version will be developed in the future. Yet, the specifications of the language already include interactivity.

Eukleides is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Bug reports as well as comments or contributions should be sent to the author of Eukleides, Christian Obrecht (obrecht at eukleides dot org).