Re: [Caml-list] labltk for tk 8.4 BETA release

["Jeffrey Loren Shaw" <shawjef3@msu.edu>]

* ease of installation 

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/Windows/8.3.5/ 

or for the beta labltk... 

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/Windows/8.4.14/ 

Yup that link should be updated. I don't think it should be bundled with 
ocaml, however. The end-user might already have it installed, or might not 
need it. But this is a decision for the ocaml devs. 

* Documentation 

You're right, it's not very good. I used the ocamlbrowser extensively to 
learn how to use labltk. It took me a lot of experimenting, and I'm still 
terrible at getting widgets laid out the way I want. 

I'm not sure how to do the documentation in an automated way without 
changing the grammar for widgets.src to allow ocamldoc comments. That's 
beyond my abilities, but I suppose it's a worthy project for someone. On the 
other hand, widgets.src is already very cluttered. 

* Other libraries 

I don't know anything about these, but again these are questions for the 
ocaml devs. 

Anyway, my focus right now is getting this beta version of labltk working 
correctly... there's a lot of functions to test. 

Now here's an idea... 

Instead of documenting labltk, which is difficult for the beginner ocaml 
programmer anyway, make a wrapper to make it more ocaml-y. I'm not sure if 
this would be easy or possible, but coercing labltk into one style of 
programming (preferably functional) could go a long way towards making it 
easier to learn for the beginner. Also the wrapper would potentially be 
easier to document. As I recall, the most difficult aspects of labltk are 
those that are imperative, eg: 

event functions are unit -> unit, (maybe this can't be avoided)
pack is difficult to deal with,
the need to use optionmenu and Textvariable.handle together is not obvious 

Another huge but useful project would be a type-safe parser for the outputs 
given by the Widget.configure_get functions. 

Now back to testing.