CIFER®-MATLAB Interfaces: Development and ... - Cal Poly

3.1.2 Problems Encountered and Solutions
The first, and perhaps most fundamental, problem encountered while developing this code was
the structure of the interface itself. Creating an interface is difficult because no one knows exactly
what is desired until they see and interact with it. Additionally, no solution is necessarily the right
or best solution. On one hand, there was a significant drive to have the interface of new code
mimic the old CIFER ® interface. On the other hand, it made equal sense to update older CIFER ®
methods to more modern implementation, and to make more drastic changes to the layout. This
question was more an issue for the GUI, but still affected the command-line interface.
One method that MATLAB uses to gather large amounts of input is through a series of namevalue
pairs. Essentially, the name of a variable is given as input immediately followed by its
value. The pros are that the lists of variables do not have to be provided in a particular order, and
variables meant to retain default values need not be specified. The con is that inputs are twice as
long as they might otherwise need to be. Figure 3.1 shows a simple example of name-value input
to a fictional function. Another possible input method is to use a structure. Structures are a
‘parent’ data type in which various other data types can be stored. Thus one structure might
contain integers, arrays, and strings organized in the ‘fields’ of the structure. Structures are
reasonably well organized, and easy to deal with from a programming standpoint; however the
format can be intimidating to non-programmers. Figure 3.1 also shows a simple structure layout,
and how one structure used as input could replace name-value pairs.
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