Re: base widgets growing uncontrollably.... ?

[Martin Schultz <martin.schultz(at)dkrz.de>]

JD Smith <jdsmith@astro.cornell.edu> writes:

 
> And to point out the obvious, there's no reason you can't make compound
> widgets also objects, rather than having an all-in-one object widget
> design.  You might then have a larger object interface which "composits"
> (i.e. includes) the sub-objects directly, perhaps creating them itself.  

That's exactly the line I am pursuing with my base GUI object and its children. 
Unfortunately, progress on this is extremely slow these days, but if you are
interested to get a snapshot of what is available, I will put these routines
on our ftp server...

Wrt procedures vs. objects: I think that objects are very "natural" in the
sense that you can almost "speak" object oriented statements. A line like
     container->Add, myobject
can be worded as "Add myobject to the container (object)",
     graph->SetProperty, color='blue', thick=2
can be communicated as "Set the following properties of the graph (object): 
color, thick(ness)"

So, for some lisp guru, it may even be possible to write a speech interface
that will produce object programs out of everyday conversations ;-) But I
realized myself that it is very hard for a person who has been trained
for years to forget about the sloppiness of human languages and strictly
adhere to procedural thinking to get over this and "relax" and think more
in everyday terms such as tasks that need to be fulfilled (and then you need
to be strict too ;-( ).

Cheers,

Martin


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[[ Dr. Martin Schultz   Max-Planck-Institut fuer Meteorologie    [[
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