Wish List : Ada95 to FOX

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

rc211v wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2002 18:35:28 +0000 (UTC), "Kent Paul Dolan"
> <xanthian@well.com> wrote:
>>Java is by design OS
>>independent, contributing to breaking the stranglehold of MS-Windows on
>>the market of "things needed to run applications". 
> 
> Java is _by_design_ a marketing product in search of a real problem to
> solve.
> 
> I've recently discovered a very nice portable graphics library, FOX.
> 
> The goal of it's designer is: "Write Once, Compile Anywhere" ... 
> 
> For those who want to take a look go to http://fox-toolkit.org . Just
> download the calculator demo. You will be impressed. 


I like the fact that FOX does not use the precompiler MOC approach

that Qt did. It would be reeeeaaal nice (hint) to have an Ada95
binding to this. I havn't looked at it in detail, so I don't know
how practical this is (written in C++).

One area that has traditionally been a sore point in Ada and GUIs is
the client_data parameter in callbacks.  Gtk kind of hacks around this,
but I'd like to see a more perfect (Ada95) solution to this problem.

I like the idea of requiring a base tagged type as the client data
parameter (classwide?), which defaults to an dummy instance base
type when none is provided.  To actually provide user data, the
user would derive from the base type, and pass that instead
when establishing the callback.

Within the callback, the user would re-cast the base_type to the
type that the callback was actually expecting to get. This way,
if the tagged type provided was not correct for the "cast", an
exception would occur and type safety is maintained.

I think FOX might permit this type of a binding to be accomplished.

I also like the fact that FOX is designed to permit dynamic
messaging between widgets. Qt and MFC for example, are fixed at
compile time by MOC/macros AFAI know.


-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg