From graphics-request at octave dot org Tue Jul  6 12:39:17 2004
Subject: Re: OctPlot - yes it's yet another handle graphics package for octave
From: "Mark P. Esplin" <mark at srl-sdl dot org>
To: graphics at octave dot org
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 13:38:37 -0400

On Monday 05 July 2004 17:33, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> An alternative is to embed octave in Tcl/Tk.   Tcl/tk adds about 900 kb
> to the executable, and I have another 900k of add-on packages.  It has
> very broad cross-platform support.   The big advantage to using Tcl/Tk
> for the GUI is that a number of composite widgets have already been
> done for you.  Another advantage is speed.  I planned to do much more
> of my apps in octave and restrict tcl/tk to just the user interface,
> but the octave interpreter was too slow for my needs, and so I moved
> data file parsing into Tcl/tk as well.

For now, a combination of Tcl/Tk and octave might be the best solution for 
writing application where a GUI is needed, but I don't think it is a good 
long term solution.  It is inefficient to have two interpreters running at 
the same time, not to mention how confusing it is to deal with two different 
languages at the same time.  Combining octave and Tk so that a single 
interperter could be used doesn't seems very practical to me either, since 
they are so different.

                      -Mark Esplin