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Re: Octave workshop for Octave 3.0.0 on windows Xp


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: Octave workshop for Octave 3.0.0 on windows Xp
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:02:43 -0400

On 28-Mar-2008, Moritz Borgmann wrote:

| I'm not an expert at all in these matters, so please take my 
| statements with caution. I wasn't actually alluding so much to the 
| handling of the command-line input. I guess it would indeed by hard 
| to have a GUI on top of Octave, but still have Octave handle all 
| command-line editing including readline. But is that a problem? I 
| mean, doesn't the GUI simply have to include decent readline support 
| by itself and it's done?

If Octave runs in a separate process, then getting at information like
which variables are in the workspace becomes more difficult.  It makes
much more sense to me to have the GUI and the interpreter more closely
integrated.

It's also somewhat difficult to deal with partial statements (think
about for loops or if statements that span multiple lines) if the
function that handles input from the user is not called directly from
the parser.  Yes, it can be done, but this kind of interface relies on
parsing the output from Octave and looking for the prompt.

Perhaps there is a better way to define some kind of protocol which
could be used to handle the interaction, but it seems simpler to me to
just include the GUI with Octave.

Is it really an advantage to have numerous half-baked efforts floating
about?  I think it might be best to have a single standard GUI
interface so that all users of Octave would have a common environment.
It also seems to me that our resources are already severely limited,
so it would make more sense to work together on a single GUI rather
than N of them.

Compare this with the current gnuplot vs. jhandles graphics situation.
When someone reports a problem, we have to ask, "Which graphics system
are you using?" and then say, "Oh, you have to deal with bugs A, B,
and C if you are using that one.  You can avoid those with the other
interface, but then you'll have to deal with bugs X, Y, and Z."  I'd
rather have a single graphics backend so that there is no confusion
about what does or doesn't work (and hopefully, more things would work
because we would be concentrating our efforts on one thing rather than
many).  Thanks to the efforts of of Michael and Shai, I think we are
approaching this situation fairly rapidly for the graphics system.

I'd like to see the same kind of effort for a GUI system, so it would
be helpful if people who are interested in working on a GUI for Octave
would work directly with us to integrate a GUI with Octave.

jwe


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