Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John W. Eaton]

On 26-Jan-2009, Pedro L. Lucas wrote:

| >
| > That being said, I think there is a case to be made for having a
| > direct backend (e.g. function call access as in octave_server) and an
| > IPC backend (e.g. as proposed by you for pipes or recently via DBus).
| >
| 
| I agree with you.
| 
| > I recently made a list of the expected functionality of this interface
| > 1) Set, clear, and list breakpoints (maybe extend to watchpoints when
| > octave supports such a thing)
| > 2) Get a command history list (possibly incremental as in
| > octave_server?)
| > 3) Get a list of variables in the current scope and the global scope
| > 4) Get or set a variable's value
| >
| 
| I think that Octave should have got a new function:
| It must execute some command and this function must not be listed in history.
| Example:
| nohistory('whos') <-- Neither nohistory nor whos are listed in history.
| 
| IDEs can use this function to do all suggested functionalities listed before.

Are you sending these commands to Octave over stdin/stdout?

If you think these features would be useful to have, then I suggest
you become involved in the development of Octave and contribute some
patches.

FWIW, I think it is unfortunate that we have N different GUI/IDE
solutions.  It would be much better to have the people who are
interested in these things working more closely with those of us who
are working on Octave, rather than having many half working or
abandoned solutions floating about.

jwe