--- Andreas Eder <Andreas.Eder@t-online.de> wrote:
> Instead of the proposed wxWidget GUI shouldn't we try to implement a
> Common Lisp GUI. I'm thinking of CLIM here. McCLIM is a free
> implementation and with scigraph there is even a nice plotting
> package for CLIM.
Absolutely. I completely agree - that's the way to go. I have in fact
been watching these very technologies for some time now. But there are
some practical limitations currently that would have to be addressed,
and they aren't on our immediate todo list.
a) McCLIM does not currently work on Windows. I believe an effort to
do this post Maxima 6.0 is worthwhile but it is not our current
priority. (Dan Stanger did some excellent work with Garnet on Windows
a while back, and perhaps that and the MacOSX backend can be used as a
starting point for McCLIM on Windows.)
b) scigraph needs both updating/bugfixing/etc and the addition of 3-D
graphics capabilities (nontrivial). To say nothing of making Maxima's
plotting routines work with it. Also very much worth doing but not on
our current todo list.
c) McCLIM currently doesn't work on gcl and clisp. Again, worth doing
but not an immediate priority, and probably needing bug
fixing/extension of the lisps in question.
> We could even have a combination of commandline and gui.
> Have a look at its cliki page http://www.cliki.net/McCLIM
> or the project page at http://clim.mikemac.com/
It's enough to make one drool. I've been able to get it compiled and
the examples working. I haven't done any development work on a GUI yet
- while I believe that McCLIM is the way to go long term, there may be
a lot of debate on that issue. Of course there can be (and probably
will be) a multitude of interfaces written for Maxima as it becomes
more robust and stable, but the project itself doesn't really have the
resources to maintain multiple interfaces. We'll need to pick an
"official" solution and work with that as our primary. (Check the
archives - there's a couple good long GUI discussions in there which
discuss a lot of issues, and IIRC the conclusion was "we'll deal with
this later").
My suggestion of a wxWidgets temp solution was mainly because a) one
already exists in beta form (http://www.geocities.com/avodopivec/) and
b) Xmaxima is being such a pain that perhaps something immediate should
be done. There's also Gmaxima (if that's still being developed) which
uses GTK - perhaps that's also a viable substitution. Anyway, I agree
with you and cast my vote for a McCLIM based Maxima GUI long term, but
we won't be able to do that for a while.
CY
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