scotte@oscvax.UUCP (Scotte Zinn) (08/28/88)
I am looking for libraries (with source code hopefully) for a package that
will make window handling with TurboC very easy. I am using a package called
WINDOW10.arc right now but there are a few problems with it. Maybe there is
a later version of this package with source code out right now. The package
is by Michael Mlachuk (TurboC) and was ported from a TurboPascal package.
Any help with this is appreciated
--- Scotte Zinn
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Scotte Zinn
Ontario Science Centre, Toronto
...!{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!oscvax!scottespolsky@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Joel Spolsky) (09/09/88)
In article <646@oscvax.UUCP> scotte@oscvax.UUCP (Scotte Zinn) writes: >I am looking for libraries (with source code hopefully) for a package that >will make window handling with TurboC very easy. I am using a package called >WINDOW10.arc right now but there are a few problems with it. Maybe there is >a later version of this package with source code out right now. The package >is by Michael Mlachuk (TurboC) and was ported from a TurboPascal package. There's a package called Vitamin C. I don't know anything about this except that Inference did a lot of research into available windowing packages and found Vitamin C to be the most flexible (beat MS windows hands down). Sorry that I don't know more. Joel Spolsky - spolsky@eniac.seas.upenn.edu spoavrj@yalevm.bitnet
romero@mind.UUCP (Antonio Romero) (09/10/88)
In article <646@oscvax.UUCP> scotte@oscvax.UUCP (Scotte Zinn) writes: >I am looking for libraries (with source code hopefully) for a package that >will make window handling with TurboC very easy. Joel Spolsky mentioned Vitamin C, so I thought I'd jump in. I've had a fair amount of first-hand experience, and I found Vitamin C to be a pretty good package on the whole. While there were numerous errors in the documentation, and the documentation was kind of obscure in places, and not too well organized, if you wanted to do anything other than what the designers envisioned, the library itself has lots of nice stuff like text windows with Wordstar-subset editing commands, a reasonable system for menus, and a few other things. My main warning about the package is that they often screw up return values for "failed" function calls-- the documentation may report functions that return pointers, or -1 on failure, for example, which in fact return a NULL. If you see something like this in the documentation be very suspicious. Check the source code. If you're ready to get your hands dirty and go grubbing through the source code (included) then you can make it do some really nice things. I had occasion to develop most of a commercial product using Vitamin C, and found the source pretty easy to understand, for the most part. It was also generally pretty extensible-- if you didn't like some behavior, you could fairly easily change it or extend it. Once I got over my initial resistance to poke through the source on my own and find what I really wanted, I was pretty satisfied. This seemed pretty true of most of the programmers using the package. Joel originally said "beats MS Windows hands down;" my only response to this is to say that they are two totally different products-- MS Windows providing a full-blown graphical environment, while Vitamin C is only a text-based windowing package. But I will say that Vitamin C is probably much easier to work with if all you're going to need is text windows. Also, I'm sure it's smaller, easier to work with and more flexible. Source is included (or at most costs $100 or so extra) and you get unlimited right to distribute things developed with Vitamin C. You may have to recompile the libraries with their compiler if yours isn't one that they explicitly support, but this shouldn't be a problem. Also, for Turbo C you may want to go through the source and generate prototypes for all of the functions, just for type-checking purposes-- it really helps. While I wouldn't say, absolutely, this is the package to use, I would consider it seriously if you're doing any kind of text-window oriented programming, and you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty. -Antonio Romero romero@mind.princeton.edu