[GRASS5] Ideas

[Justin Hickey]

Hello Tim

Tim Cera wrote:
> You are describing the internal workings to choose differently coded
> interfaces.  What I proposed is that the interface is not in any
> compiled code at all, anywhere.  The interface would be in text files
> that the user can edit, and change the interface without re-compiling
> the program or knowing any C. 
> 
> take care
> tim cera

Hmmm. I'm still having problems understanding how this would work. As
far as I know (my knowledge may be limited here since I am not familiar
with many of the recent changes to HTML - dynamic HTML and style
sheets), HTML does not have a mechanism for interfacing with C code
applications. That is, passing the applications various data, and
receiving various information from a C program and displaying it to a
user. For example if one of the grass programs generates an error, how
does the error message (handled by the G_fatal_error() function) get
passed to HTML so that it can pop up a window to present the message?
This is what I don't understand.

> In effect, the interface is written in an interpreted display
> language.

This is what Tcl/Tk is. But unlike HTML, Tcl/Tk has a mechanism for
interfacing with compiled C applications. The work that I will do will
put all the interface generation code in Tcl/Tk scripts that will (just
like your HTML version) be in text files that users can edit. Isn't this
what you are suggesting only I am using Tcl/Tk instead of HTML? I don't
see how our proposals are different except for the choice in GUI
language.

> but a new language could be made up to suit, like what the sci (
> http://linuxparts.com/software.html ) developer did.

I'm sorry but that page does not describe what the author did and I do
not have time to go through the source code. Could you please post a
summary of what this package does in terms of creating a GUI and
interfacing it with an application?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see the difference in our
proposals. I don't see how you can avoid the mechanism that connects the
GUI to the application (the generic functions I talked about in my last
post).

-- 

Sincerely,

Jazzman (a.k.a. Justin Hickey)  e-mail: jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
High Performance Computing Center
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Bangkok, Thailand
==================================================================
People who think they know everything are very irritating to those
of us who do.  ---Anonymous

Jazz and Trek Rule!!!
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