Re: Terminal emulation in Octave GUI

[Christopher Hulbert]

2011/4/7 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> On  7-Apr-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> | On 7 April 2011 01:44, Jacob Dawid <address@hidden> wrote:
> | > it turned that I was not aware of the problem with readline. However, it 
> is
> | > quite questionable if putting a terminal emulation into a window can be a
> | > solution for a GUI - I don't think so.
> |
> | I think you simply are envisioning a limited terminal. I don't know of
> | a reason why we can't have an Octave terminal in a GUI with readline
> | and not build other bells and whistles on top of it, like syntax
> | highlighting or pop-up completion menus. What I do think is rather
> | silly is to reimplement parts of readline like tab completion or
> | history search.
>
> Since this seems to be quite a sticking point for GUIs, I'm willing to
> reconsider.
>
> It seems to me the real question is about who should be handling
> events.  People who write GUIs think that the GUI should be the one
> handling all events.  That's counter to what normally happens for a
> command-line application, where it is normally waiting to read input
> from the terminal.  GNU readline allows functions to be called
> periodically while it is waiting for input, so it is possible for it
> to handle events while waiting for input, but people who write GUIs
> still don't like this very much because it is not the normal way they
> think about handling events.

Has anyone looked into the architecture of clang [1]. Speaking with no
detailed knowledge of octave or clang, it seems that the objectives of
clang would be very similar to what you would want with octave. The
"octave frontend" so to speak that could read the current input,
safely test the input and provide diagnostics. Again, I don't know
much about the octave internals or clang, but have been using XCode 4
lately which uses clang to check the source in the IDE, and one of the
goals of the clang effort is to enable tight integration with an IDE.
It's also open source.

1. http://clang.llvm.org/index.html

>
> jwe
>