david@twg.com (David S. Herron) (07/12/90)
[...For those who aren't already familiar with it...] Briefly speaking .. WINTERP (Widget INTERPretor) is a user interface language for windowing systems. It allows rapid prototyping, for application specific primitives to be built in C (or some other compiled language), and very importantly for end users to potentially have control over how the application is presented to them. All of this is good. A bad thing, arguably, is that at the moment it is Motif based. There's an awful lot of Mac's and IBM PeeCee's and Amiga's out there y'see. It would be nice to have the same sort of capability on those platforms. To build some specific application with winterp one builds some modules in C for running application specific data structures and OS interface. Then one builds the xlisp/winterp necessary to drive those data structures and the application. I don't think it would be necessary to have the exact same lisp on each platform. That might be too big a problem to chew comfortably. Instead what I envisioned in the shower this morning :-) is to repeat the same basic project of doing an interface between xlisp and the native windowing system on each platform. (or in the case of PeeCee's one might have to create a windowing system...) To port an application one would still have the back-end code already written and assumably portable enough that it would work across OSes. All that would have to be repeated is the lisp driving the front-end. Hopefully the lisp would be similar enough across window systems that the translation would be moderately easy. A closely related question: Suppose you really dislike the Motif widget set but still want to use X & winterp. It's just a matter of doing the widget class mappings for the other widget set, right? -- <- David Herron, an MMDF weenie, <david@twg.com> <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david@ms.uky.edu> <- <- Sign me up for one "I survived Jaka's Story" T-shirt!