Re: OCaml's long range graphical direction?

[Jacques Garrigue <garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>]

From: Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>
> > This convoluted class and method system is intended to make using
> > lablgtk easier on the long term :-)
> > In fact, people seem to be coping with it OK. That is, I didn't get
> > that many questions on it. But certainly, there is a huge deficit in
> > documentation.
> 
> I just hack on the examples, but surely a bit more documentation would
> help. This might be good Consortium work, or even fixable with a volunteer 
> effort. 

Any volunteers ? Currently I have no time for documentation, sorry.
By the way, we can discuss that on the lablgtk list.

> After all of the admonitions against the use of Obj.magic it's a bit
> disconcerting to count 41 Obj.magic usages in lablgtk. I recall
> hearing that that will change. What's the plan?

Do not forget that any "external" declaration also amounts to an
Obj.magic, and there are 955 of them in lablgtk.
Seriously, most Obj.magic in lablgtk amount to a cast of an external
after checking its validity, and I see no way to avoid that.
What should disappear after ocaml 3.01 is release is the use of
     external coerce ... = "%identity"
which is an equivalent of Obj.magic used to go around some limitations
of the type system. There are 24 of them, but they will not be needed
anymore thanks to variance annotations in types.

Jacques
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Garrigue      Kyoto University     garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
		<A HREF=http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG</A>