RE

The Reconstruction Engine

Overview

Still the best reference for the objectives and operation of the software is this 1994 article:

https://aclanthology.org/J94-3004 The Reconstruction Engine, a computer implementation of the comparative method

This repository contains code and data files supporting the "Reconstruction Engine" project.

RE has been written now in 4 languages (SPITBOL, PERL, Java, and now Python). The "legacy" PERL version is included here (legacy/RE7) and may still work.

However, the modern version has three components:

• The 'core system' (in src) which includes Python modules to diachronically process the various language files (in `projects').
• The 'desktop version', a gTK graphical interface, currently a work in progress. see src/REgtk.py)
• The 'web interface', a Python flask+bootstrap interface to allow users to browse the projects and results, either locally (when installed) or on the web. see REwww

The directories of interest are:

main components

• projects - "the data and parameters" -- various sets of language files, tables of correspondences, etc.
• projects.toml - list of the available projects, public and private
• src - source code for everything except the web interface
• docs - documentation, very much a work in progress
• make / Makefile - we use this for testing and QA

web interface components

• REwww - source code for the bottle+bootstrap web interface
• styles - XSLT stylesheets

past code and other goodies

other_stuff

python needs

• requirements.txt
• GTK (for desktop interactive app)

usage

See src/README.md for details how to run from the command line and interactively.