Re: [open-cobol-list] Simulating radio buttons.

[Brian Tiffin]

john Culleton wrote:
> The facility for creating screens,receiving data
> etc. has one glaring deficiency. There is no
> facility for radio buttons. Has anyone come up
> with a clever way to simulate them? I know one
> can put a number in a field and test that
> number/lettter on exit but I am looking for
> something more spiffy. Python uses Tkinter which
> in turn feeds off of the TK part of Tcl//Tk. Tiny
> Cobol has an assembly language bridge to Tcl/Tk
> also.
>
> Just wondering.
John,

What timing.  The interactive periodic table uses simple GTK buttons, 
but actual radio buttons would be very similar code.

http://sourceforge.net/p/open-cobol/discussion/cobol/thread/f83b59cb/

Of course that's not a terminal application, but a full on gui screen.  
But, mentioned it here as, except for a few edge cases, GNU Cobol has 
direct access to GTK.  Direct from COBOL sources, making GTK screen 
programming as easy (and as hard) as it is in C.

I'm finding that native X11 (and Windows umm, whatever the API is 
called) to be just as accessible.

Rildo's Tcl/Tk layer worked (out-of-the-box) with GNU Cobol. 
http://opencobol.add1tocobol.com/gnucobol/#can-gnu-cobol-interface-with-tcl-tk

I think GNU Cobol will get embedded Jim too, a small footprint Tcl 
reimplementation (no Tk as of yet). 
http://opencobol.add1tocobol.com/gnucobol/#can-gnu-cobol-interface-with-jim-tcl

We can do Python too, but I'll admit to failing importing IPython during 
the experiments, so the bindings will need some work.
http://opencobol.add1tocobol.com/gnucobol/#does-gnu-cobol-interface-with-python

Then, there is Warren Gay's CobCurses; written before Roger added SCREEN 
section.  Warren did a pretty extensive job, but I'm not sure if it 
includes radio-button ish modes or not. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobcurses

It might be cool to try and link in with "dialog" type libraries as 
well.  Quoted dialog, as it is a shell command for fancy box and line 
terminal graphics. http://invisible-island.net/dialog/manpage/dialog.html

There are a few systems like dialog; zenity, xdialog etc.

Oh, and Federico's guicobol preprocessor is worth looking at as well;  
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guicobol

Spoilt for choice John (oh, but you might notice how I didn't actually 
answer the question of emulating radio buttons with SCREEN though)

;-)

Cheers,
Brian