John Meacham wrote:
the widget name could just be another property, settable by whatever our standard get/set routines turn out to be.
On Xt, the widget name: a) isn't a property, b) has to be specified at creation time, and c) cannot subsequently changed. You could fudge a), by making the property-handling code have a special-case trap for the name; but that's ugly. BTW, some properties have to be specified at creation time, and can't subsequently be changed.
if 90% of toolkits ignore the name anyway, forcing a user to specify them always would probably result in people giving them meaningless names anyway if they don't know what they are for.
The proportion of toolkits doesn't matter; if you want to write code which works on all toolkits, you have to have a name. Also, there are benefits to having named widgets; e.g. it would be possible to implement some of Xt's features on other toolkits.
we can probably generate somewhat useful names automatically. like button1..button3 for the first three children buttons of a given widget or whatnot...
That results in a maintenance headache. If you add another widget,
subsequent widgets would get renamed, and you would then have to
change the resource files to match. Similarly, if a widget is
optional, the names of subsequent widgets would vary.
--
Glynn Clements