re: front & back end communication / was GUI ...

>>>>> "CY" == C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:

    CY> --- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:

    >> Keeping the same information in 2 places is always a problem,
    >> basically.

    CY> Hard to sync them?

Basically.  Just hard to remember in which cases both things have to
changed.
 
    CY> I agree :-).  But the preference seems to be strongly in favor of two
    CY> separate processes for GUI and kernel, and the lack of threads is a bit
    CY> of a problem as far as the single lisp image idea goes.  So the

As I said before, I have never wanted to continue computing when I'm
waiting for maxima to compute something so being single-threaded
doesn't bother me.  Perhaps I'm unusual that way?

    CY> But what it does do is in effect provide the same lisp environment for
    CY> both the GUI and the kernel, which is the next best thing to them being
    CY> in the same lisp process.  I suppose total duplication might not be
    CY> terribly elegant, but it would be effective.  I can't imagine this
    CY> would give modern hardware any trouble.  The duplication would in
    CY> effect be the price of having two separate processes for GUI and
    CY> kernel, which seems to be the popular way to go on the list.  So long
    CY> as the GUI part has the information of the kernel without having to do
    CY> the work of deriving it, that should (hopefully) be fairly CPU
    CY> inexpensive.  

It seems we have few enough people just making maxima work, and adding
on something additional that needs to be maintained in 2 places just
makes unnecessary work.

And if the GUI is not in lisp, maintaining the state gets that much
harder because now you have to maintain 2 bits of code doing the same
thing in different languages.  :-)

Ray