Re: Objc++ support in gcc

[Damian Steer]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

"Chris B. Vetter" <chrisv@web4inc.com> writes:


> > would be good to have some kind of reference application.
> 
> WorldWideWeb.app, later called Nexus.app (IIRC), by Berners-Lee,
> OmniWEB by OmniGroup,
> SpiderWoman, by Sente
> 
> You can still find (parts of) the source for WWW.app on the web, the
> other two were "closed" source.

I had a go at porting the available WorldWideWeb.app a little while
ago. It stalled (badly) but here is the situation (roughly):

(I don't know a great deal about NeXT/OpenStep so there are probably
some inaccuracies)

The source code is (largely) intact - however some C source is
missing. I'm /pretty/ sure it is just a primordial libwww (yes, the
one you still see).

WWW was written for NeXT - pre OpenStep. It needs extensive conversion
so I ..

got hold of an (aged) OpenStep (running under VPC on Mac OS X -
past meets future ;-) and ran the conversion tools on it. Nib wouldn't
convert - but the interface seems (from screenshots) to be very
simple.

This left me with some nasty code with many, many #warnings telling me
to fix things: NXStreams (now NSData?), NSTextRuns (or some such -
seemed like JFC), other things.

Here things went badly because I don't know the NeXT framework, and
couldn't find much documentation, and didn't have the time to spend
much time on the project.

AIUI WWW is (essentially) a subclass of NSTextView, but the text
classes seem to have changed substantially. Having worked out a little
of what was going on I had to abandon it. :-(

So there you have it.

I really wanted to do this since a) the original browser was actually
quite cool - authoring support and all, b) it is a piece of history
well worth reviving and c) it would get GNUStep some glory.

I should add that TBL is a friend of a friend. He said I could
consider the code open etc, and (I think) would like to see it running
again.

As an amusing postscript when I found that the code was incomplete
there was a suggestion that the code might be on TBL's old Cube. 

Which is in the Science Museum in South Kensington. On display.

:-)

Email enquires may even have been dispatched.

:-)

If anyone wants to have a go I'm sure TBL will be supportive. I don't
even think it's that hard, but I'm really not that knowledgable.

Damian
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (Darwin)
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.6 and Gnu Privacy Guard 
<http://www.gnupg.org/>

iD8DBQE82czgAyLCB+mTtykRAiIyAKC+6fjYqWvZLrZ3dpqSoxGaNY6IdgCgns4t
HrR0ifuyNRHCNIMInLiiwt8=
=GWm5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----