From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Tue Dec  3 15:21:59 1996
Subject: Re: Matlab ginput 
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 15:21:40 -0600

On  2-Dec-1996, niles at axp745 dot gsfc dot nasa dot gov <niles@axp745.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:

: Please check out 
: 
: http://axp745.gsfc.nasa.gov/java/XYPlot/
: 
: (make sure you try all three mouse buttons...)

I see that the middle and left mouse buttons allow zooming and
extraction of coordinates.  What is the first mouse button supposed to
do?

: It's something I whipped up in a few days of Java...  But I really
: think Java is the way to go!!

: I know some people had there heart set on Tk, but I really think this
: will be more portable

Since things are likely to change, I'm planning on making it as easy
as possible for people to use different graphics packages and toolkits
with Octave.  My first implemenation will probably use plplot and
Tcl/Tk not because I think they are perfect, but because I think it
will be possible to implement most of the important features that
people seem to want.  Also, I believe that they will probably work
well together (plplot already has an interface to Tcl/Tk).

I'm not proposing that Octave users start writing Tcl/Tk code directly
to manipulate GUI and graphics objects.  That would be a mistake,
because it would make it nearly impossible to switch to other GUI and
graphics toolkits later.  Instead, Octave users will write code that
can be expected to work no matter what toolkit is actually being used.
I don't know yet exactly what the syntax and semantics will be.
Compatibility with Matlab is still a reasonable goal for GUI and
graphics objects, but get() and set() will probably not be the only
way to access graphics objects.  I think it makes more sense to take
advantage of Octave's data structure capabilities directly, but that
doesn't prevent writing some M-files to implement get() and set().

Again, if you would like to participate in discussions about the
details of the implementation, send me mail.

: (I'd guess C++ was somewhat new when jwe started)

According to The Design and Evolution of C++, Stroustrup started work
on C with Classes in 1979 (several years before I knew anything about
computing) and published the first edition of The C++ Programming
Language in late 1985.  I started working on some of the C++ classes
for Octave in the summer of 1991.  Full time work on the interpreter
began in February 1992.

jwe