Re: [ANN] Ltk - The Lisp Toolkit

From: Peter Herth (herth_at_netcologne.de)
Date: 06/13/04 

Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:58:06 +0200

Rob Warnock wrote:

> A few small suggestions:
>
> - The interaction between DO-EXECUTE, START-W, *W*, the callers of
> START-W, and the users of *W* seems a bit awkward. Since you already
> have DO-EXECUTE heavily conditionalized for various operating systems,
> it might be better to simply eliminate START-W altogether, pull the
> pathname for "wish" out into a global constant to make it easier to
> conditionalize for local variations [see next item], and just have
> the two former callers of START-W call DO-EXECUTE directly. And perhaps
> the same for the args to the "wish" process (in case somebody wants to
> start "wish" with a different colormap or something). The result might
> look something like this:
>
> (defconstant +wish-pathname+
> #+freebsd "wish8.3" ; or 8.4, whatever
> #+(and sbcl (not freebsd)) "/usr/bin/wish"
> #-(or sbcl freebsd) "wish")
>
> (defconstant +wish-args+ '("-name" "LTK"))

Yes that was a little bit cluttered. I have cleaned it up following
your suggestions. Yet I think it may be useful to declare wish-pathname
and wish-args as special variables, so that it can be overridden
for special purposes without changing the Ltk source.

> ...
>
> (defmacro with-ltk (&rest body)
> `(progn
> (setf *w* (do-execute +wish-pathname+ +wish-args+))
> ,@body
> (mainloop)))

I have retained (though cleaned up) start-w, so that especially
for playing with Ltk from the REPL you can initialize it without
exposing details to the user.
 
> - Your doc file suggests:
>
> Note: on FreeBSD wish resides in /usr/local/bin/wish8.4 for
> Tcl/Tk version 8.4. You either have to modify the path to wish
> in ltk.lisp or create a link called wish to the executable
> (like: cd /usr/local/bin;ln -s /usr/local/bin/wish8.4 wish).
>
> Actually, on FreeBSD there is *already* a program named "wish", which
> when run, says this:
>
> % wish
> In FreeBSD, wish is named with a version number. This is
> because different versions of wish are not compatible with
> each other and they can not all be called "wish"! You may
> need multiple versions installed because a given port may
> depend on a specific version.
>
> On your system, wish is installed under at least the following
> names:
>
> wish8.3
> %
>
> So you probably don't want to overwrite that program. ;-}

Indeed :). It was only a shot in the dark after I received a mail
from a FreeBSD user, as I have no FreeBSD experience of myself.

> - On Common Lisps which provide threads (CMUCL, SBCL, others), it would
> be nice if LTK:MAINLOOP ran in a separate thread, so that one still
> had access to the main REPL, at least while debugging. [Time permitting,
> I'll try to hack something up to work under CMUCL as a base case...]

Yes that might be useful. You can find some thread stuff in ltk-remote,
which creates a seperate thread for each new connection. With CMUCL I
made the experience that the threads do not mix well with SLIME,
but that probably is a mistake a I made.

I just uploaded the newest version of Ltk to my website, incoorperating
your changes. Due to the experience with the last version I released,
I have labled it seperately as ltk-latest.tgz and will only move it
to the stable version after a few days of use...

Thanks for your contributions.

Peter 

-- 
Peter Herth
pet project: http://dawn.netcologne.de
homepage:    http://www.peter-herth.de
lisp stuff:  http://www.peter-herth.de/lisp.html

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