Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Olaf Till]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 07:08:13AM +0100, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> 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.

Just my 2 cents for this: we formerly did some optimizations with a
rather complex Octave codebase and some repeatedly called function
printed a state to the terminal (with paging switched off). This was
useful, but sometimes the printing was very fast. It would have been
inconvenient to turn it off. So there was much text wizzing over the
terminal.

I have heard from a Matlab user that turning off printing could make
Matlab faster in such cases, i.e. turning on printing slows it
down. Maybe this is more due to text-display handling than to internal
data transfer, but such problems could be encountered with an
Octave-IDE too.

Olaf