On 20-Mar-97 Larry W. Virden, x2487 wrote:
>>things on them. ) The main problem was that the dump routines use the class of
>>widget converted to lowercase as the name of the widget creation command.
>>Stupidly the tix authors have things like the notebook widget which has class
>>TixNoteBook but is created using tixNoteBook. After a short look at the tix
>
>Um, excuse me. But that's a bit rude, don't you think?
No. If I had used strong language that would have been rude but "stupidly"
means "unintelligently" which is what I meant.
>
>The practice of uppercasing for class and lower case for widget is pervasive
>in X. Anyone who does it differently I would suggest is the one doing
>it incorrectly. Perhaps the author of the dump routine should consider
>flipping the practice...
E-mail always sounds rude, but what I am saying is that 99% of widgets in
tcl/tk use uppercase in the widget class names and lowercase for the command
which creates the widget. For example...
blt_barchart creates widget of class Blt_barchart.
button creates class Button.
toplevel creates Toplevel etc etc
but ...
tixNoteBook creates TixNoteBook.
tixBalloon creates TixBalloon, etc etc. so you have to treat tix specially if
you want to guess the creation command from the widget class, which is
essential for a GUI builder.
I think that being able to find out the command which created a widget from
it's class in a simple way is very useful. Doing this via simply changing the
class to lowercase is a nice solution which is used by most of the widgets I
use, except Tix.
Of course the work around is to simply change the case of only the first
letter of the class name but you have to do this in several places to get
things to work which is not particularly nice to have to do.With a little extra
thought the tix authors (and other widget authors) could have made the job of
writing a gui builder a lot easier.
Graham
P.S. I must be more careful copying mail addresses from the mailing list. For
some reason this mail reader did a CC to the list when I thought I was sending a
private E-mail to the original author of vtcl to tell him that I was working on
adding tix to vtcl and have a lot of sympathy with him for the hard work
required.
-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-
Beware of geeks bearing gifs... ;^) Tel:(757) 269-7030,http://alcor.jlab.org
