GUI [was: Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave]

[Søren Hauberg]

tir, 04 01 2011 kl. 11:35 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> There is another project which is just as important as all these even
> if it's not as glamourous: Octave needs a GUI, IDE, black-on-white
> terminal with antialiased fonts; whatever you want to call it, and it
> needs an officially sanctioned one, in the same source tree as the
> rest of Octave, or at least as a Mercurial subrepo.

I think what is really needed is a nicer C++ interface to the
interpreter. Quite some time ago I played a bit with GUI's and I arrived
at the conclusion that the best solution right now is that taken by
OctaveDE (hooking into the readline idle loop). With that approach you,
however, not do much more than embed a terminal in your application.

I would love it if we had a C++ interface that allowed you to:

      * Determine if a line of code could be fully parsed, i.e. it would
        return true for "plot (x, y);", but false for "while (true)".
      * Evaluate a line of code and return the output as a string (it
        would be best if it could provide three strings: output,
        warnings and errors).
      * Query defined variables, i.e. get a list of currently defined
        variables. Bonus points if it could tell you if anything had
        changed since the last time you checked the variables (could
        also be done with signals).

If we had a single C++ class that would allow this, then I'm sure it
would be much easier to write a proper GUI.

Søren