On Monday, 2003-02-17, 23:34, CET, Glynn Clements wrote:
Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Generally, you only set widget properties programmatically if you have to (i.e. because the values are determined dynamically).
Yes,yes :) I was not proposing any true API, just arguing that one can abstract over a yesNoCancel dialog window, parametrizing it with the verb to use on macos and kde3 to avoid a "yes/no" question.
I think the distinction between static values (which don't have to be computed at run-time) and dynamic values (which have to be computed at run-time) is not very natural. It is just like a distinction between squares and rectangles which are not squares.
Huh? Would you build a web site entirely from CGI scripts, even for static pages?
My plan for the Haskell Web Publisher is indeed to produce everything dynamically (maybe based on static data from databases etc.) One advantage of this is consistency.
Static-vs-dynamic is a pretty fundamental programming concept; e.g. the distinction between variables and functions in most languages
But not in Haskell! (And that's a good thing, I think.)
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This does not solve the verb conjugation problem,indeed (how does apple handle it in internationalization?)
Your approch for the Yes-No-Cancel dialogs was to specify a verb describing the action (e.g., "save") and to let the system produce the button captions. Why shouldn't we just define a function which has the captions of the Yes and the No button directly as arguments? An example application of it could be dialogYesNoCancel "Save" "Don't save" <other arguments> which would name the buttons "Save", "Don't save" and "Cancel" on the Mac and "Yes", "No" and "Cancel" on a PC running Windows or KDE (:-)).
Because localisation is a lot easier if all user-visible text is in one place (and in a place other than the source code).
I didn't want to vote for strings in the source code here but for specifying complete button captions (e.g., "Save" and "Don't save") instead of just a verb (e.g., "save") which the library would have to conjugate.
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Wolfgang