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TCL has Tk...

Grant Edwards grant at nowhere.
Mon Feb 14 13:52:26 EST 2000 
In article <14504.14805.107030.838217 at weyr.cnri.reston.va.us>, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:

>Grant Edwards writes:
> > Modula-3 has it's own widget set and windowing system.  Don't
> > know if that has contributed to it's success or not.
>
>  Have you ever used it?  

Yes, albeit only for a trivial example program.  I rather liked
the glue-and-boxes way of packing things (but as a TeX user of
10+ years, that's not too surprising).  It always takes me a
number of trial-and-error iterations with Tk's packing
parameters to get things to resize the way I want them to. I've
used Tk off and on for several years, and I still don't have a
good understanding of the packing options. I also liked the
ability to save the packing organization as an external
resource.

I did miss the ability to hook widgets directly to variables
the way you can in STk -- Having to call get() and set()
methods of widgets certainly makes the connections between
application code and widgets explicit, but at least for small
examples it's pretty verbose. But, as I said, I only played
with a small demo program.  There may be other shortcomings
that aren't apparent until you play with a larger application.

The main drawback [and the somewhat opaque point of my original
post] of the M3 widget set is that it is M3 specific, and
knowing that widget set isn't a portable asset the way knowing
gtk or Tk is.

Learning a new language is one thing.  Learning a new widget
set is another [IMO, harder] thing.  I think Python is well
served by having bindings to widget sets that people already
know how to use.  I've no objection to somebody who wants to
invent yet another widget set, but it should be done because
you want a new widget set, not because you want Python to have
it's own widget set.

>I'd say it's a point against.  Modula-3 is nice, but the widget
>set didn't behave in a way that I liked whenever I played with
>the sample code.  It was enough that I didn't use it for any
>GUI work, though I liked the language and the "Network Objects"
>support.

I quite like the M3 language, and think it's one of the better
choices for developing large and/or distributed applications.
It does require a bit of user-overhead to configure an
application directory structure and "makefile" setup, so it's
not really suitable for slapping together a small throw-away
utility -- Python is a much better choice for that.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  A shapely CATHOLIC
                                  at               SCHOOLGIRL is FIDGETING
                               visi.com            inside my costume...
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