From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Mon Oct 28 14:41:46 1996
Subject: GUI interface for Octave
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: octave-graphics at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 14:41:43 -0600

To further start things off, I will comment on something that Carl
Leitner sent to me:

: This is primarily the reason I asked.  I would be interested in working on
: this.  I have some background with expect/tcl-tk, as well as the
: X-interface w/ Matlab.  But before I begin doing so, I would like to
: bounce some ideas around.  Here is what I am looking at:
: 	1) Trying to make it as close to Matlab's interface as possible
: 	2) Either: 
: 		Creating a new loading function to filter the X
: 		commands to expectk and the non-x to octave.
: 		(This could prevent people from typing in X
: 		commands or create incompatibilities w/ other
: 		versions of an  X-interface)
: 	   Or:
: 		Running any x-capable *.a files under expectk
: 		and piping the appropriate stuff to octave
: 		(This would require two binaries
: 			octave
: 		 and 	octave_tcl)
: 
: What do you see as advantages/disadvantages to any of these aproaches.  
: Are there are aproaches that might be equally fit, or better?

I don't think we need to define new syntax, or modify the parser to
pass commands to some other program.  In fact, for graphics, one of
the problems is that I tried to allow gnuplot commands to work
directly rather than just specifying a function call interface.  Now
gnuplot and Octave's command lines tend to be slightly incompatible as
features are added.  I would prefer to avoid problems like this in the
future by using a function call interface and not defining new syntax
unless it is absolutely necessary.

I don't really have much experience with the get/set commands for
manipulating GUI objects in Matlab, but I think a simple structure
interface would work well.  The get/set commands could always be
implemented for compatibility, but I don't think that should have to
be the only way to do this.  One problem is that the command `set' is
currently used for setting gnuplot options.  This will need to be
fixed.

jwe