[Caml-list] exene and ocaml ?

[briand@aracnet.com]

I'm new to ML and have been wondering the ML landscape looking for
nifty ML related tidbits when I ran across exene (http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~jhr/eXene/).

Has anyone in the ocaml community ever even considered porting this to
ocaml ?  I noticed that it requires threading.  Does anyone have an
opinion as whether ocaml's threads would be compatible with such a
system ?

Thread based gui implementations are the way to go (aren't they ?)

I have been working with labgtk and I've noticed that it suffers from
the underlying limitations of gtk, i.e. it's pure event based.  So
consider an interactive routine to draw a line:

event mouse_button:  draw_line with mouse_button event
event_key: draw_line with key_event
event_motion: draw_line wtih motion_event
...

draw_line event_variant :

dispatch on event

  do something with a GLOBAL variable (or module local ?) !

  pass state information back to main routine to signal change of
  state, e.g. escape key has stopped line drawing mode


YUCH.

Consider the much more elegant and functional implementation:

new line = draw_line event_stream

draw_line event_stream
  consume events until done
  return tuple (success/fail, line object)

I'd rather program the second way.  I think exene lets you do that.

I think that maybe a fudgets style interface might also work well, but
I have a harder time understanding how fudgets work.

OK, well I've used up by nightly bandwidth for the caml-list.

Thanks

Brian


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