Re: Other Octave-forge functions to port to the core

[Quentin Spencer]

David Bateman wrote:
> * Is the term code in waitbar portable? Should it be rewritten to use
> the GUI when written rather than like it currently is?
>   

As the original author of waitbar, I should speak up here. I really 
don't know how portable it is--I didn't really know what I was doing 
when I wrote it. The only purpose of the term stuff is to get the 
terminal dimensions if they are available. If they aren't there's a less 
pretty looking default mode. I'm sure this could be done using ncurses, 
which is used by core octave already, right? I'm not sure which GUI 
you're referring to--gnuplot, or one of the new and not officially 
supported GUIs? I'm not really sure how you would do this with gnuplot. 
There are advantages and disadvantages of making a GUI-based waitbar 
like Matlab's. Using the GUI makes it possible to have multiple 
simultaneous waitbars, but it is also slower, and it requires extra code 
to close all of the waitbars when you're done with them, or the screen 
becomes littered with them. I like the text version myself, but making a 
GUI version could be useful.

Quentin