In article <·················@netcom.com>
·······@netcom.com "Bill Newman" writes:
> I last tried Scheme ports of the Tk toolkit (guile and STk) about a
> year ago, and they were respectively unusable and usable but slightly
> flaky. tcl/Tk and Perl have been portable and solid and useful for a
> long time. Why is it hard to find their like in the Lisp world? I
> don't know how hard it is to create and support such a package, but
> it's strange that people are motivated to do it outside the Lisp
> world. (I haven't tried scsh, maybe I should..)
Believe it or not, but I tried to install STk today. I've
not yet found the installation instructions, if there are
any. They _should_ be obvious, in a file called install.txt,
like so many other free software tools. I've no idea why
it won't run yet, and since I'm very short of disk space
at the moment, I removed the files. When I get a new drive,
or some more time, then I'll try again.
I wasn't impressed. No doubt I'd feel differently if it
came with an install program and STk was running a few
minutes after using it. I'd _pay_ for a good tool that
I could use, and STk could perhaps be such a tool, but
I can't pay for an easy installation.
Fortunately, I'm patient enough to try again. Sometimes
a 'free' lunch is worth spending a little time on.
> It's IMHO a tragedy that John Ousterhout didn't use Scheme instead of
> a warmed-over shell language as the basis of tcl. I think the result
> would probably have been even more successful than tcl/Tk: the
> command-line syntax could be the same (by eliding the outer
> parentheses if necessary), but the programming semantics would be
> enormously improved. With large programs in the native language a
> practical proposition, who knows how far it could have gone?
I seem to recall that his justification of tcl is that a lot
of people use it, so it must be good. This is a fair argument.
It must have some value. I don't like tcl much, and I hope I
never have to use it, which is very likely. I can very easily
avoid Tk, too, and since I have no compelling reason to use it,
I may succeed in doing that.
Is Tk really so great that I should spend time learning how
to use it? Possibly, but nobody is demanding that I should,
while there are many other tools that I have damn good reasons
to learn about and use.
Perhaps this would be different if I used Unix for a living. ;)
It's one of those little accidents. The problem, for me at least,
is that I'm far from alone.
> If the functionality of Tk version 3.6 and/or Perl version 4.0.19
> (i.e. the versions documented in the Ousterhout and Wall/Schwartz
> books) were available as libraries for a reasonably stable, friendly
> free Common Lisp or Scheme or ML implementation (e.g. clisp, or scm if
> it had a debugger, or perhaps smlnj) I think a *lot* of free lisp/ml
> software would be written. Until that occurs, large free programs
> will by and large be written in C/C++, and smaller ones in Perl or
> tcl/Tk.
Sadly, yes. People use C++ because they can. It's there, and
C++ vendors make great efforts to make their compilers as easy
to use as possible. For many tasks, Perl is even more useful.
Lisp and ML are better languages, but the implementations
available, at least for the platforms available to me, aren't
packaged in such an attractive and friendly manner.
This might not seem important to some people, but that's why
tools like VB and HyperCard are so popular.
> PS. I haven't seen anything about guile on the Scheme newsgroup for a
> while. Does that mean that it's not going anywhere or that people
> have decided that guile doesn't belong there?
I know even less about Guile.
> PPS. Perhaps I am excessively critical of STk. It was a pretty
> impressive package, and it is probably more impressive now. However,
> it did occasionally lock up in various odd ways on my plain vanilla
> Linux machine. (I've *never* had such a problem with tcl/Tk or Perl
> -- they have always preserved the integrity of the interpreter no
> matter what programming errors I made.) It's also a little ugly the
> way that it mechanically translates the syntax of the Tk interface
> into Scheme, and unfortunate that it preserves the the man-page-based
> tcl/Tk documentation (which is IMHO the worst implementation feature
> of the tcl/Tk package).
I don't find that encouraging, but thanks.
These days, I prefer documentation in HTML. It now looks like
even MS have been converted - they're replacing their help engine
with HTML technology. Could the days of man pages be running out?
Hmm. I dunno. ;)
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Future generations are relying on us
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We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
············@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes:
>Believe it or not, but I tried to install STk today. I've
>not yet found the installation instructions, if there are
>any. They _should_ be obvious, in a file called install.txt,
>like so many other free software tools.
The installation instructions are at the top of the file `README' in
the top-level directory when you unpack the files. I think that's
pretty obvious, don't you?
--
Matthew McDonald ····@cs.uwa.edu.au
"Like most functions in the standard C library most MPI functions
return an integer error code. However, like most C programmers, we
will ignore these return values in most cases." -- User's guide to MPI
In article <··············@cs.uwa.edu.au>
····@cs.uwa.edu.au "Matthew McDonald" writes:
> The installation instructions are at the top of the file `README' in
> the top-level directory when you unpack the files. I think that's
> pretty obvious, don't you?
It must be missing from the archive I downloaded, coz I can find
no such file. There's just stk.exe. In fact, there's not a README
file in the entire archive.
Still, it's worth checking for the obvious. Perhaps this file is
normally present in STk archives, but not this one? I dunno.
--
<URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough
Future generations are relying on us
It's a world we've made - Incubus
We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind