Re: [rgui-dev] Re: Gutopia-dev Digest, Vol 1, Issue 45

[Tom Sawyer]

On Saturday 14 December 2002 02:50 pm, Thorsten Roggendorf wrote:

Thorsten,

> The definition looks pretty clean. Does yaml use indention for scoping?

yes

> This looks really good and intuitive. If you bring in another language
> you *might* scare of people though ... or maybe not? Who knows ... I
> think it does not matter all that much. First it needs to be decided,
> what metaphor to use, and which (levels of) abstractions. If all really
> is as simple as it looks in this example, one could easily hack together
> a GUI for editing the tree. BTW: the whole thing starts looking like
> glade. Are we reinventing the wheel? Could glade xml files be used as a
> meta interface definition?

yes, gladish. good point. but there's some important distinctions to draw. not 
that i have drawn these all that distinctly with my example. nonetheless, 
you'll notice that we are not so much defining aspects of a specific 
interface, like galde does, but merely the overall means of interaction. for 
instance, in the example i label Ok as an action, not as a button. and for 
good reason, this action could concievably be utilized by a CLI just as well. 

okay, maybe i'm stretching things a bit, but that's what i'm pushing for. i 
will work on elevating the abstraction level more. i want to go back and read 
some old posts in the mailing list on the subject to stimulate some more 
thought on the matter.

one thing that hit me after i sent the example out, is that with the event: 
clause i have inadvertantly created a new sort of programming language. i 
didn't mean to! honest :) its kind of cool though if you think about it. by 
using the event clause, one defines a type of method. moreover, it interfaces 
with another programming language rather seemlessly. in this case Ruby, but 
it could be any language. (Lisp jumps to mind). perhaps, though, i have gone 
too far, and have taken us away from our real goal with this idea. but 
honestly i could not figure out a more appropriate way to have the status 
message start out blank and then be filled with the message upon the 
triggering of the event, hence the use of the event clause.

-transami

p.s. you gave me some good chuckles :) thanks. and is this the 44th post to 
the GutopIa-dev list? well, congrats! so now i've sent you 45 :)