[GRASS5] GUI for GRASS

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all.

> c) What's the state of Windows support?

I had a look into this today and found that the Windows GnuStep graphics is
alpha only but under active development.

I feel that if you were to choose to use Objective C (much as it appeals),
you might as well go all the way and use Smalltalk.  For example Squeak
Smalltalk is stable, free software, maintained by an enthusiastic and large
group of people (including Alan Kay and friends) and has excellent cross
platform portability including hand-helds, Unices and Windows.  It also has
a built in 3D graphics engine which can automatically take advantage of
acceleration hardware, and a well established foreign function interface.

Whether such a course of action would sit well with the average potential
user/developer of Grass would be an interesting question however.  Hence:

> Even if people can learn it, will they? Or will they turn away as soon
> as they realise that it's in a language they don't currently
> understand?

I have to say that despite it's limitations, C is an excellent language and
there is plenty of scope for making the current Grass source base more
maintainable as discussed in other recent threads.

As a matter of interest, I wrote from scratch some some simple minded
Haskell which parses and displays Grass 4 and 5 CELL rasters (plain and RLE)
but not FCELL, including several variations of colour file and it took only
a few hundred lines of code, so there is plenty of attraction in using a
higher level language than C.

Cheers

Mike Thomas