Re: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk>]

Jeffrey Carter wrote:

> Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
>> Marin David Condic wrote:
>>> Wait a minute. Aren't directories usually considered to be some kind 
>>> of tree structure? Doesn't MSVC++ and the MFC supply some kind of 
>>> tree widget for displaying things like directories? Seems like every 
>>> time I pop up a directory on Windows, I see something that looks very 
>>> reminiscent of a tree and one that looks surprisingly like the one I 
>>> seem to recall was in the MFC. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks to me 
>>> like Microsoft might just be keeping some kind of tree data structure 
>>> in place for handling directories. Not that the fact that Microsoft 
>>> does something necessarily makes a recomendation for doing the same - 
>>> but it would seem like it might not be all that painful for some apps.
>>
>> You're right, but this doesn't work very well when you drop
>> into a directory with thousands of files. A smart tree widget
>> might just peruse "directory portions", where the tree widget
>> is visible (perhaps a less than trivial exercise). But I suspect
>> they take the easy way out, and require all entries to be loaded
>> in to the widget's dynamic memory. Otherwise performance in large
>> directory cases would not be so abysmal.
> 
> The Windows directory tree only shows directories; the thousands of 
> files are not part of the tree. This helps reduce the size of the tree. 
> The thousands of files are shown in the other pane of the window; as you 
> note, it can take a long time to display all the files in a directory 
> with many files.

What guarantee do you have that you will not have thousands of
directories? There is no such guarantee, although you might
find it more rare in practice ;-)

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://ve3wwg.tk