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