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000083_icon-group-sender _Sat Oct 22 13:59:40 1994.msg
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1995-02-09
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sat, 22 Oct 1994 13:22:13 MST
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 13:59:40 +0600
From: jeffery@runner.jpl.utsa.edu (Clinton L. Jeffery)
Message-Id: <9410221859.AA00125@runner.utsa.edu>
To: dkuhlman@netcom.com
Cc: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
In-Reply-To: <1994Oct22.124554.21508@kf8nh.wariat.org> (bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org)
Subject: Re: Icon and Tk
Content-Length: 1689
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
dkuhlman@netcom.com (G. David Kuhlman) says:
| X Icon supports drawing, but not creating windows containing pushbuttons,
| checkboxes, listboxes, etc and interacting with those controls. If
To which bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) sagely replies:
Look in the Icon Program Library. There are quite a few widgets supported.
(ipl/gprocs/*.icn)
To sum up: Icon's built-in support is mainly graphics output oriented. It
gives convenient access to mouse input, but does not provide a hardwired
set of user interface facilities. The IPL does indeed offer a suite of
user interface tools, and an interface builder, which both started as
student efforts but which are usable (and are being further improved)
thanks to Gregg Townsend. We are using these tools extensively in my
Software Engineering class this semester, and students are almost happy.
Built-in language support for user interfaces in Icon could be much better
than the present suite of tools. Doing a good language design is extremely
hard; there are things about the graphics interface that still aren't quite
right. What I am trying to say is, sure, we can improve the function
library, or write alternative function libraries to e.g. Tk, but the real
Challenge for the long haul is to figure out what language support for user
interfaces should look like in terms of built-in types and control structures.
I think almost every user interface library author on earth believes this
includes objects, but what else? What can we do to make it fit seamlessly
into conventional programming and existing programs, and what can we do to
make it truly easy to extend with new user interface devices?