David W Noon schrieb:
All this docking talk is nice and everything, but sometimes I ask
if shouldn't just go SDI for Lazarus IDE. I found it odd at the
beginning, but after using several other SDI IDEs now I can't find
reasoning in Delphi-old MDI...
I think you meant other way round. :-) Old Delphi 7 and earlier used
SDI interface by default.
No, that's neither MDI nor SDI.
Actually, Graeme is correct.
Each of the discrete windows contains a single "document", so it is
called a Single Document Interface.
Perhaps we should distinguish between windows and applications. When an
application opens multiple windows, every window can be SDI or MDI.
At the *window* (technology) level we can determine whether MDI client
windows exist. So far Delphi or Lazarus *never* have been MDI applications.
At the *application* level IMO SDI indicates one single application
window, like implemented by most IDE's (RS, VS...). An IDE can contain
multiple projects (solutions...), and a project can consist of multiple
source files, but only one of them is accessible at the same time.
If you have a copy of Visual BASIC 6 handy, you can switch that IDE
between MDI and SDI to see this effect. [Earlier versions of VB were
SDI only for the IDE, but could easily produce MDI or SDI apps.]
AFAIR that was like RadStudio now can be switched between new "standard"
and "classic undocked" views, and the new (monolithic) view is called "SDI".
Back in the late 1980s, when IBM and Microsoft were both involved with
OS/2 development, both companies came to the conclusion that MDI
sucked. This was because one cannot get through to one's desktop
without minimizing, or at least shrinking, the MDI parent, thus losing
display of all documents simultaneously. More than 20 years on, this
problem remains with MDI, but software companies still produce MDI
applications. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ... :-(
You seem to associate MDI with a single application window. IMO this
view neglects both the "document" and "interface" aspects.
DoDi
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