>> Also, the Win32 concept of a "window" is not the same thing as what 
>> you or I would consider a "window". (E.g., a checkbox is a "window".) 
>> Makes things interesting...
> 
> *Everything* is a window.  That is, if it's somehow graphical and 
> something you might normally stick on a window, it's a subclass of 
> "Window."

The usual term is "widget". That way, if you mean "any component", you 
say widget, and if you mean "thing that looks like a window", you say 
"window".

Under the Win32 terminology, there's no way to talk about real windows 
specifically.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> You know, if you sit down and read this stuff, there's actually a *hell* 
> of a lot of switches and options in there...
> 
> Like, you'd think creating a window would just be "hey, please create a 
> window with this title please". But no. Apart from being able to specify 
> the title, icon, and initial size and place, you can do a whole heap of 
> other things:
> 
> And you thought you could just OPEN a window... ha!

The way AmigaOS handled this stuff was to use tag lists.

If you call OpenWindowTagList(null), it opens an untitled window on the 
current screen, taking up most but not all of the display, with the 
default window gadgets. Instead of a null pointer, you can (and usually 
do) pass a pointer to a "tag list". This is simply an array of key/value 
pairs (ending with a TAG_DONE key).

I don't recall the symbol names off the top of my head any more, but you 
could add a TAG_TITLE key, with a string pointer as the value, and the 
window would then have that title. Or you could add TAG_LEFT and set the 
X coordinate for the left edge of the window.

Basically, with each new release of the OS, they just added some more 
tag IDs to the header files. So rather than remembering a bunch of 
function parameters, or even having a struct full of fields that you 
append to, you have this tag list which has any combination of values, 
listed in any order. Each time they need to add a new tag, they just add 
a new ID.

Now if you have a 32-bit bitmap, you can specify 32 flags. But if you 
have 32-bit tag IDs, you have four billion possible tag IDs - which 
you're never likely to run out of! (The header file would be several 
gigabytes in size, back in a day when everybody worked off 720KB floppy 
disks.)

This simple idea makes it trivial to expand the OS, trivial for the OS 
to parse the window spec, and trivial for the application to write the 
window spec. (It could be static data, for example. Or dynamically 
written. Or whatever.) And AmigaOS used it for much more than just 
creating windows, of course.

(Tag lists didn't exist under Kickstart 1.3. It was only added with 
Kickstart 2.0.)

Oddly, this feature doesn't seem to be apparent anywhere in Win32. It 
seems the Win32 Way(tm) is to have a big struct, and pass in a pointer 
to the struct and also a length indication, and the function you're 
calling decides which version of the struct you've given it based on the 
length...

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Invisible wrote:
> The way AmigaOS handled this stuff was to use tag lists.

A very un-OO way of doing it.

Better would be something like
x = new Window();
x.title = "Hello there";
x.background_color = red;
....
x.show();

Of course, that works best if your language is meta enough that you can put 
strings like "title\thello\nbackground_color\tred\n" into a file and read 
the file at runtime and generate those calls/assignments without a whole lot 
of effort. (And the assignments would translate to method calls, of course, 
in the overloaded-operator sense.)

> (Tag lists didn't exist under Kickstart 1.3. It was only added with 
> Kickstart 2.0.)

That explains it.

> Oddly, this feature doesn't seem to be apparent anywhere in Win32. It 
> seems the Win32 Way(tm) is to have a big struct, and pass in a pointer 
> to the struct and also a length indication, and the function you're 
> calling decides which version of the struct you've given it based on the 
> length...

Nobody said win32 was a *good* way to do it. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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>> The way AmigaOS handled this stuff was to use tag lists.
> 
> A very un-OO way of doing it.

Um, yes... This was 1992?

> Better would be something like
> x = new Window();
> x.title = "Hello there";
> x.background_color = red;
> ....
> x.show();

Sure. Just as soon as you figure out how to encode that at the machine 
level in a language-independant way that's efficient to generate and 
parse...

> Nobody said win32 was a *good* way to do it. :-)

Um... actually I'm pretty sure that's *exactly* what Microsoft says 
every freakin' day. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> The way AmigaOS handled this stuff was to use tag lists.
>>
>> A very un-OO way of doing it.
> 
> Um, yes... This was 1992?

That wasn't a criticism.

>> Better would be something like
>> x = new Window();
>> x.title = "Hello there";
>> x.background_color = red;
>> ....
>> x.show();
> 
> Sure. Just as soon as you figure out how to encode that at the machine 
> level in a language-independant way that's efficient to generate and 
> parse...

I think we figured that out a while ago. Besides, doing what I just wrote is 
trivial to wrap into your mechanism, or the win32 mechanism.

> Um... actually I'm pretty sure that's *exactly* what Microsoft says 
> every freakin' day. :-P

Oh? And that's why they invented .NET?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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On 10/13/2009 12:14 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Better would be something like
> x = new Window();
> x.title = "Hello there";
> x.background_color = red;
> ....
> x.show();
>
> Of course, that works best if your language is meta enough that you can
> put strings like "title\thello\nbackground_color\tred\n" into a file and
> read the file at runtime and generate those calls/assignments without a
> whole lot of effort. (And the assignments would translate to method
> calls, of course, in the overloaded-operator sense.)

Sounds like you would like HTML Applications (HTA).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(VS.85).aspx

Now obsolete in favor of PowerShell.

-Mike

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SharkD wrote:
> Sounds like you would like HTML Applications (HTA).

No need. Most of the interpreted languages can handle this. It's trivial in 
Tcl or Python, for example, and not even very hard in Java or C#. It's just 
when you throw out *all* the metadata that it becomes difficult to look up 
functions by name.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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>>> A very un-OO way of doing it.
>>
>> Um, yes... This was 1992?
> 
> That wasn't a criticism.

Here's a thought... When the hell was Smalltalk invented? And the 
Smalltalk machine hardware?

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Invisible wrote:
>>>> A very un-OO way of doing it.
>>>
>>> Um, yes... This was 1992?
>>
>> That wasn't a criticism.
> 
> Here's a thought... When the hell was Smalltalk invented? And the 
> Smalltalk machine hardware?

Around 1974 to 1976, with the first "big" release non-experimental version 
of smalltalk being the Smalltalk-80.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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>>>> Um, yes... This was 1992?
>>>
>>> That wasn't a criticism.
>>
>> Here's a thought... When the hell was Smalltalk invented? And the 
>> Smalltalk machine hardware?
> 
> Around 1974 to 1976, with the first "big" release non-experimental 
> version of smalltalk being the Smalltalk-80.

Mmm. Seems OO really, *really* took a long time to catch on. Hell, in 
1989 I was still programming in BASIC on my dad's C64. :-P

Kinda scary to think that all the revolutionary ideas are actually 
centuries old, eh?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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