(arghh... I keep forgetting to fill out the To: and Cc: fields correctly...)
What are the two Ints? Pixels? Dialog units? Fractions of something? I just wonder if it is really simple. Convince me that it is! :-)
Ah those nasty dialog units. I never thought of anything else but pixels. But Windows, too, supports placement by pixel coordinates, so it's not really a problem. But I'll not insist on it for now....
I meant that placing a widget at a specific position will be just an IO action like "placeWidget" above. This cannot be expressed by combinators, otherwise you already have the dynamic version.
I don't think so. I'd do it like it's done in Apple's Cocoa, i.e. specify the initial coordinates + a few flags that specify resizing behaviour. I'd use the same combinator or whatever mechanism that is used for the "real" layout mechanisms. First, we need to agree on a general way of how to specify layouts... Do we really want combinators, or is that too abstract for our purposes? I was originally thinking of just using IO actions to add widgets to a container or to pass the container on widget creation; and to pass along some "layout constraint" (which depends on the container type). For a container that does grid-based layout, I'd pass a row and column number (and perhaps row & column span). For a container that does "explicit placement" layout, this "layout constraint" would just be the bounding rectangle in pixels, plus perhaps resizing flags. If we don't put the "explicit placement" container in the public interface, I'll still have it internally in the Mac version - as I said, It's useful for implementing the other kinds on top of it. The first reason why I thought we might want to have explicit placement everywhere is that it was my impression that it was easier to implement than any "serious" layout manager, even on platforms that already provide automatic layout (I might be wrong, though). I would just like to have some way to see if I implemented the Mac version of the XYZ widget correctly, and to compare it with other platforms, before I had all the layout stuff in place. But as I said, I won't insist on it. Cheers, Wolfgang