I had a _very_ interesting experience yesterday.
To set the background, understand that while I maintain the FAQs for
comp.lang.tcl, I am by no means an expert, nor even an intermediate,
programmer in Tcl. I've written few, if any, entire programs in Tcl. My
experience is mostly in editing, info gathering, organizing, etc.
I do however love to play with Tcl programs, try out many of the new
ones as they come out, and know enough tcl to try to figure out problems
and occasionally hack in a solution. Oh, and I build new releases for
the programmers here.
Anyways, I was showing vtcl 1.09 to a Tk programmer here. It was quite
enlightening. I have figured that my problems figuring out what to do with
vtcl were simply because of my inexperience with Tk. However, watching
this programmer struggle, even briefly, with vtcl indicates there is
a few places to investigate enhancements.
The first thing he wanted to do was to turn on the grid manager. Remember,
we are using 1.09 here. He tried 'pressing the manager' buttons on the
top of the geometry window. It _appears_ that these were just 'indicator
lights' showing which manager was in effect, becausing pressing grid
would not change to the grid manager - instead, we had to go to the main
tool window and press grid there.
Two other areas gave a bit of problem. The first was figuring out,
after getting grid to activate, how to get the 'geometry' of the window
to work. He would press north/south/east/west or sticky, and sometimes
the buttons would highlight and sometimes they would not. It wasn't
obvious to me what needed to be done. However, I suspect it was a
paradigm conflict that we were encountering.
Finally, a very interesting bug was encountered. Before we realized that
we were not getting into the Grid Manager, my friend had tried setting some
of the values in the geometry window. He set several to 0, trying to get
a label widget in a toplevel to move to that position. What he ended up
doing, by accident, was getting some variable in vtcl set to zero that
began causing divide by zero errors. _Every time_ from that point on that
_anything_ was pressed in vtcl, a divide by zero error occured. We had to
kill the process to get rid of vtcl - even trying to quit caused this
error.
Anyways, this is _not_ intended to be a gripe session regarding vtcl, just
a set of observations of how others use vtcl during the first time.
One thing I found myself 'longing' for was a log function in vtcl, where it
would record every event that was occuring. In that way, I could send along
the log as a bug report.
With the proper extension, it might even be possible to use the log as a
playback mechanism to 'drive' vtcl in a regression mode test type of way!
--
Larry W. Virden INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<URL:http://www.teraform.com/%7Elvirden/> <*> O- "We are all Kosh."
Unless explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting should
be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
