MacBALSA was written by Marc H. Brown as part of his thesis work at Brown. This software is capable of performing very sophisticated algorithm animations. The following article contains a good description of the software.
Marc H. Brown, Exploring Algorithms Using Balsa-II, IEEE Computer, May 1988, 14-36.
Marc's dissertation is available in print as
Marc H. Brown, Algorithm Animation, ACM Distinguished Dissertations, MIT Press, 1987, ISBN 0-262-02278-8.
The enclosed balsa-manual.pdf gives a less technical description of the software. Please note that it contains Marc Brown's old address. His current address is mhb@ariba.com. It also contains some warnings against copying the software. Marc has assured me that it is OK to copy the software. I hope to replace this manual with an updated version that corrects these errors.
It seems that MacBALSA was meant to accompany Sedgewick's Algorithms book.
Robert Sedgewick, Algorithms, Addison-Wesley, second edition, 1988, ISBN 0-201-06673-4.
(There are variants called Algorithms in C, Algorithms in C++, and Algorithms in Modula-3.) The algorithms are organized by chapter number in this book. It also appears that MacBALSA was the source for many of the figures in the text.
I produced version 1.0 of MacBALSA using version Aleph 4 of the source code. It will run on a 68K Macintosh that has the Thread Manager installed or any PowerPC Macintosh.
Newer releases of the MacOS had rendered version Aleph 4 of MacBALSA fairly unstable. In this version I have corrected all of the stability problems that I could identify. I have fixed a number of bugs. I also changed the software so that it uses threads when running algorithms. Please let me know if you discover any problems.
MacBALSA work in Mac OS X's Classic environment, but I would like to see it carbonized. If anyone does this, please let me know.
Download MacBALSA 1.0.2. This version fixes a crashing bug on a PowerPC.
Download the source code for MacBALSA. Please send me any changes you make so I can incorporate them.
Last updated: 2001-04-19 Rick Zaccone