Re: octave gui & mingw

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Feb-2006, John Swensen wrote:

| I tried using the 
| QProcess class and redirecting STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR to talk with an 
| instance of Octave.

I think that this is doing things the hard way.  Sure, it should be
possible to mostly get it working right (the inferior-octave mode for
Emacs is an existence proof of that) but talking to Octave via
stdin/stdout presents a lot of problems.  You have to parse the output
to decide what to do (are we looking at a new prompt yet?  what if the
user sets the prompt to the empty string?) and different versions of
Octave may change the way output appears.

| Regardless of which toolkit is chosen for the "standard" octave UI, I 
| think the first step would be to design a good interface control 
| document (ICD) that defines the data that is passed between the octave 
| core and the UI.  A mechanism also needs built into the octave sources 
| that provides a level of thread safety.

Yes, this would be much better.  The question then is who is in charge
of the event loop?  Does Octave run as the main process and provide
GUI features, or does the GUI run as the main process and link to
Octave as a library providing a numerical engine (i.e., you bypass
most of the code in Octave that deals with user interaction)?

jwe