On Saturday, 2003-01-25, 06:58, CET, seth@cql.com wrote:
Wolfgang,
No disagreement, but then we return to the question: why not use an existing toolkit such as gtk? Especially as there is an existing haskell interface to it from which a lot can be learned.
I never meant not to use an existing toolkit. In fact, I always meant that we should use existing "native" toolkits/libraries in order to achieve platform look-and-feel etc. Because for POSIX I see the available desktop environments as platforms, I would prefer a GTK+/GNOME implementation instead of just a GTK+ implementation but to get a working solution a GTK+ implementation is o.k. What we cannot do with the HToolkit approach is to reuse one of the existing Haskell GTK+ bindings since the C interface we bind to has to be already platfrom-independent. But of course, it can be learned from them. By the way, the approach of doing the platform-dependent stuff completely outside Haskell and providing a platform-independent interface in C has another advantage. Since most programming languages can export C functions, this approach allows as to also implement our GUI stuff on top of a non-C library/toolkit. We could for instance write C++ code which is based on Qt and the KDE libraries and exports our standardized platform-independent C functions.
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Wolfgang