Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:28 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 28-Jan-2009, Pedro L. Lucas wrote:
>
> | We need your help to do that. You (or all togheter) must define an
> | interface for IDEs.
> | If you don't do that, every IDE will make its own interface ==> Chaos
>
> Why should this be my job?  I don't personally care that much about
> using an IDE for Octave, so I'm fairly certain that I would not be the
> right person for this job.  Instead, I think the people who care about
> writing and using IDEs should be involved in the discussion, and
> should ultimately be the ones to write most of the code.  That doesn't
> mean I won't have an opinion about what design is good or bad, or what
> should be included in Octave, but I doubt that I will be making it a
> priority to come up with something.
>
> | If I start to send patches, these patches will work only for QtOctave,
> | because I will define my own interface.
>
> What prevents you from designing something more general?
>
> | XML interface sounds good. Easy to use and can be used from all
> | programming languajes. I think thqt QtOctave can be modified to use it
> | and so do other IDEs.
> |
> | What do you think?
>
> Does XML do a good job for large amounts of binary data (like a large
> double precision floating point array, which is something that is
> common in Octave)?  If not, then I'm not sure it's really a good
> choice.
>

Without intending to go into the IDE discussion, I'd like to note here
I do not think that an interface must really be good at transforming
lots of binary data. When, in Octave, I try to directly view something
with more than, say, 500 elements, it's an accident. For large arrays,
I only work with graphs, subviews and summary stats, and I bet that's
what most people do.

cheers

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz