tracton@godot.radonc.unc.edu (Gregg Tracton) (11/15/89)
X Fans,
If an X programmer wants to call an XToolkit from multiple languages,
in theory, should the vendor supply multiple bindings to the toolkit?
Or should the programmer write the bindings? Are bindings a good idea?
Would creating a message passing protocol to this theoretical toolkit
be too much of an investment for a binding? Or should an
X programmer just write a few language wrappers, which translate a call
from one language to another?
Certainly the XToolkit would have to use the lowest common denominator
of argument types in its interface, right? (Where argument types are
pass-by-value, pass-by-address, pass-by-name...) For instance, if
Fortran (yuch!) were to be included in the group of supported languages,
pass-by-value would be the only supported argument type, right?
How have others solved (or ignored) this problem sucessfully?
-Gregg "what's this Xtk stuff doing in my soup?" Tracton
--
Gregg Tracton Dept of Radiation Oncology tracton@godot.radonc.unc.edu
(919)-966-1101 Univ of North Carolina {...}mcnc!godot!tracton
"In C++, only your friends have access to your private members."asente@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Asente) (11/16/89)
DECwindows provides non-C bindings for both Xlib and the X Toolkit. The problem of parameter types was thought about in the toolkit. All procedures that call back into the application have only reference parameters. (Except for widgets; each widget has a pointer to itself as its first word so passing it either way is equivalent (disgusting hack, but it works!).) -paul asente asente@decwrl.dec.com decwrl!asente