On Dec 16, 2007 9:21 PM, Patrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't need much convincing that the > whole Bash as a nervous system + (Python/C/Ruby etc) as the muscle is a > dumb idea!
I did something slightly similar (quite) a few years ago to control a large painting scanner. The program had to control a large robot, a lighting and filter system and a camera, be easy to modify and be usable by non-experts. I did a simple GUI in C++/Motif (shows how long ago this was) with large buttons for "Start Scan" and so on. Each button launched a bash script, and each bash script used a set of low-level programs written in C to drive different parts of the hardware. It worked reasonably well. As I recall, the issues with the design were: 1) difficulties transferring data between the GUI and bash at script start and stop time 2) bash's lack of complex data structures and arithmetic 3) progress feedback from a running bash script was ugly 4) cancelling a running script (and leaving the hardware in a sane state) was ugly 5) performance ... was fine, actually, but I can imagine applications where it might not be If I had to do it again I think I'd do the whole thing in Python (except the very low-level hardware control). It ought to fix these problems. John _______________________________________________ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
