From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon Dec 11 14:04:12 2000 Subject: Re: The future of Octave From: Jonathan King To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 14:03:48 -0600 (CST) On 11 Dec 2000 teg at redhat dot com wrote: > > Argh. TclTk can best be decribed as "evil" and "obsolete", and I think > the company who did this (Scriptics, which changed the name and was > bought) has dropped it. No huge disagreement about Tcl, but the Tk GUI library is still a wildly successful product, with good bindings to it available from (among others) perl, python, scheme, haskell, and others I know I'm forgetting. The Perl/Tk project has also procuced a version of Tk (pTk) that is disentangled from the tcl-ish parts. Tcl and Tk, meanwhile, are being kept alive in the free/open software community: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl/ (This is worth mentioning in that I thought Octave had, at one time, some kind of sourceforge presence itself.) > If a GUI is to be made, I think using gtk+ would be better - it's the > foundation of GNOME, GNU's desktop. If taking the next step and using > gnome, visualization could be done through bonobo. I haven't looked at gtk+ bindings recently (I know they exist), but it used to be that one huge advantage of the Tk approach was that it was high-level enough to use in short-and-sweet programs. Plus, I think it matches fairly well with the kind of GUI projects that I suspect would be built on top of Octave. None of this is to say that Tk is the only way to go, but I think that Tk has a stronger case than some people may realize. jking ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------