Until January 2001, COMPONENT 2.0 was distributed by the Natural History Museum in London, where I worked when I wrote the program in 1991-1993. COMPONENT 2.0 is now available for free. The documentation is online as PDF files, and the source code is also available.

Source code

The source code for COMPONENT 2.0 is available under the GNU General Public Licence. The code is being released in the hope that it may be of interest to those interested in programming phylogenetic methods. Although the compiler used is now obsolete (see below), the code is reasonably well documented and so should be understandable. Although many of the methods or graphic capabilities have been superceeded by more recent programs (such as GeneTree, TreeMap, and TreeView), there are a number of algorithms in COMPONENT that have not, to my knowledge, been implemented anywhere else.

Compiling COMPONENT

The souce code for COMPONENT is written in Turbo Pascal, and requires Borland's Turbo Pascal for Windows version 1.5. At present Borland are no longer distributing this compiler as Turbo Pascal has been superceeded by Delphi. The user interface to COMPONENT depends heavily on Turbo Pascal specific features and class libraries.

Turbo Pascal is a wonderful compiler, but has little or no project management. Because of the size of COMPONENT, and the need for various DLLs, building COMPONENT is a little complicated. I've tried to simplify the process using a makefile.

Step 1

Open a command prompt and in the root of the source code directory type

make all

make install

This will compile the custom control DLLs and the installer program (not really needed but included for completeness).

Step 2

• Launch the Turbo Pascal IDE and from the Options menu choose Open. Select the file TPW.CFG in the source directory. This is the configuration file for COMPONENT.
• From the Compile menu set the primary file to CPW3.PAS
• Then choose Compile|Make (or press F9) to compile the main program.

Step 3

Step 2 builds the executable CPW3.EXE but we still need to add the resources (because of the size of the program Turbo Pascal can't do this automatically).

• Launch the Resource Workshop program that comes with Turbo Pascal. Open the file CPW3.EXE.
• Choose File|Add to project. Select the file BIG.RES in the directory resource.
• Save the project.

The file CPW3.EXE now has the menu, bitmap, dialog and icon resources and can be executed.

COMPONENT links

COMPONENT home page

Download source code

Download executable

Documentation (PDF files)

Joe Slowinski's review in Cladistics

COMPONENT Lite (Macintosh version)
In 1997 I started work on a Macintosh version of COMPONENT before, abandoning the project to do other things. The resulting program is buggy and incomplete, but you might want to have a look.

COMPONENT 1.5 (DOS version)
Part of my PhD project: ancient attempt to implement cladistic biogeographic methods.

Related software

TreeView

TreeView X

GeneTree

TreeMap

RadCon