On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Matan Ziv-Av wrote:
> I think I might have overstated my fear of bloat.
Then start fear as much as you stated: as a maintainer of a project,
you're the only person responsible enough to stop it from bloating.
> If I though using gtk or qt would help me in that goal, I'd
> use it.
It would: why re-invent the wheel? Gtk (e.g.) already has a text-widget,
and a GUI builder. It'd take 10 minutes to generate, via glade, the
basic window system you'd use (I.e., app window, menu bars, status
bars, the works)
> If I thought Python would help, I'd use that.
It would too: wouldn't you want to write as much code in a language that
doesn't require you to think about allocating and freeing memory, and
won't let you segfault the application?
> To make it clear - I am trying to write the pico of hebrew word
> processors. Not the emacs of such.
Let me suggest that writing Pico is harder then writing EMACS: the
interpreters already exist, and writing things monolithically is always
harder.
> About using a scripting language to enhance an application: this is an
> open source program. The scripting language is C and the only limitation
> is that "enhancing scripts" need to be available at compile time.
1. C is the worst possible scripting language.
2. You need a clean API for enhancements: no one would maintain an
extension to all the weird things you'd to to your application's inner
interfaces.
3. "Compile time" isn't good enough. What about 100 users using the Word
Processors, each with 100K of disk quota? Why shouldn't they be able to
extend their word processor a little bit, just because they can't keep a
version of it in their home directory?
4. If you want to compete with MS-Word: remember, it's got VB on its side.
> This talks only about one thing - I don't like using a mouse.
But since you're not the main user of your program, if you want other
people to use it you have to include mouse support. Again, if you use
something like Gtk, you can define keyboard-shortcuts easily. If you do it
in a scripting engine, each user can choose his keyboard shortcuts.
--
Moshe Zadka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
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