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000023_icon-group-sender_Mon Mar 3 08:08:35 2003.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id h23F79w16439
for icon-group-addresses; Mon, 3 Mar 2003 08:07:09 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200303031507.h23F79w16439@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: ernobe <ernobe@yahoo.com>
X-Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Re: GUI Front End for icont
Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 16:35:19 -0600
User-Agent: Noworyta News Reader/2.9
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
Frank J. Lhota wrote:
> In some previous versions of Icon for MS Windows, there were two separate
> sets of Icon tools: one for command line interface (CLI) applications, and
> one for Graphic User Interface (GUI) applications:
>
> - For CLI applications, the Icon compiler was called "nticont.exe", and it
> used "nticonx.exe"as the interpreter; and
> - For GUI applications, the Icon compiler was called "wicont.exe", and it
> used "wiconx.exe" as the interpreter.
>
> Needless to say, the need for the source files to support both sets of tools
> requires lots of MS Win-specific code, creating a maintenance nightmare. As
> a result, the Windows port of Icon has lagged behind ports on other
> platforms.
>
> I considered this approach unnecessarily complex, so a while back I worked
> on having one set of tools that could be used to build and run both CLI and
> GUI applications. To accomplish this, I ported the Unix Icon code to the
> Cygwin compiler, keeping the MS Windows code for the graphics facility. The
> result of this effort is a icont / iconx pair that can be used to compile
> and execute Icon applications that use CLI, GUI, or both.
>
> On the one hand, this port was extremely successful. The Cygwin version of
> Icon is much closer to Icon on other platforms, and the number of source
> code differences between Unix Icon and MS Icon has been significantly
> diminished. On the other hand, there is something that has been lost in this
> process. The MS Windows version of the Icon compiler for developing GUI
> application used to be a GUI application itself. This is not the case with
> the Cygwin version of icont.
>
> Of course, one way we could get back a GUI for compiling and linking Icon
> programs is to develop a GUI front end for the CLI version of icont.
Better yet, why not make a CLI for the Cygwin version of iconx?
> In a
> sense, that is what Microsoft does with its compilers. For all the fancy
> features of Visual C++, when the GUI actually compiles a C/C++ file, it
> simply runs the CLI tool CL.EXE with the appropriate arguments. Presumably,
> this could also be done with icont.
>
> One could develop the GUI front end using C / C++ and the Win32 API, but if
> we do this, the GUI would only live on the MS Windows platform. A more
> portable approach is possible: why not develop the GUI front end in Icon? By
> doing so, the GUI front end can be ported to any platform where Icon
> supports graphics.
>
> So, is the Icon graphics facility up to the challenge of the GUI front end?
>
>