From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Sat Dec  9 15:40:15 2000
Subject: Re: The future of Octave
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at kienzle dot powernet dot co dot uk>
To: "Stef Pillaert (KAHO)" <stef dot pillaert at kahosl dot be>
Cc: Andy Adler <adler at freenet dot carleton dot ca>, help-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 16:54:13 +0000

I've been hesitant to pursue this option for three reasons.  

    1) The need to learn a second language for programming callbacks
    2) The overhead of installing and running a second large interpreter
    3) The ungainliness of tcl/tk

It occurs to me, though, that we can apply the same approach that I would
recommend for an embedded GUI, which is a widget register defining the
range of widgets available, and their properties and callbacks (including
some packing widgets).  The widget definition can include all the bits
of the foreign interpreter that are needed, leaving your Octave scripts
with pure Octave code.

The overhead of the second interpreter is offset by the benefit of having
the GUI in a separate process.  Even if we did our own specialized
GUI in a separate process, we would still have to incur that overhead
(though presumably the specialized interpreter would be very simple).

Every TclTK application of any size that I've seen has been slow and ugly.
Maybe pythonGTK or perlGTK would work, but I've never used either.
I don't know if this allows us to use non-standard GTK widgets, such as
gtkplot or gtkglarea.  Any idea?

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at kienzle dot powernet dot co dot uk

On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 09:18:45AM +0100, Stef Pillaert (KAHO) wrote:
> > 0. First, how important is keeping octave development alive anyway?
> >    Do enough people care?
> >
> Well, I certainly care. I use octave every day, and couldn't imagine how to
> do my research without it anymore! A great thanks to John! I hope the
> development goes on! I do have plans to use octave even more for some demo's
> for our students, since I'm getting very at ease in coupling octave with
> some Tcl/Tk GUI.
> BTW, what is this "Matlab" everyone keeps talking about? ;-)
> 
> Stef.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------