Yves Surrel <surrel@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I post also this message to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/win32forth/
This category of topic usually generates a lively discussion on
comp.lang.forth although it might degenerate into an argument about the
inadequacies of the ANS standard. It has been a dream of many to have a
cross-platform syntax-identical Forth.
....
A few random thoughts on pursuing the holy grail of unified source
cross-platform development...
Mac users do not like GUI's that look like they were cloned from a PC,
and I suspect the converse is also true.
It is not just Windows/Menus/Controls/Dialogs that differ between the
various OS's - event handling, networking, inter-application
communication, help functions, scripting, hardware interfacing,
internationalization, etc are all quite different. Even the same data
structures saved to files can be different (Big vs Little Endian memory)
One problem I see relying on Java is that Java has not seemed to live up
to its initial hype. Do you know of any solid commercial applications
written in java?
If you just want to isolate the GUI and display, it would be worth
looking into OpenGL which is capable of some impressive graphics with
minimal coding. The OpenGL wordset is platform independent, so it only
remains to provide Forth<->OS glue for the GL primitives, and the "good
stuff" is all usable in Forth. Jorge Acerda Macia has done some of this
for GForth, George Kozlowski in MacForth, and Nao Sacrada in Mops (see
this newsgroup about 4-5 months ago). Perhaps we could find some
Windows Forthers using OpenGL and jointly work up a "Forth OpenGL
standard". The interesting thing to me about OpenGL is that besides
things like doing fancy animated 3-D graphics it also is a full run-time
"shell" that does all the basic event handling, window management, etc
in a platform-appropriate way. Forth "Handlers" are easily installed for
handling program-specific stuff, like mouse-clicks, keypresses, menu
selection, etc. So you I have a nice OS X demo of an OpenGL
stand-alone program with forth handlers for a few actions - it required
only minimal recoding to convert a GForth OpenGL example to Carbon
MacForth. (email me if you want either to d/l the demo or the source -
the GForth source is supplied in GForth.)
NextStep (the ancestor of Coocoa) has versions for Windows and various
Unix's, I believe.
REALbasic <http://www.realsoftware.com/>
can do cross-platform
development.
Runtime Revolution is a cross-platform RAD-like solution that has been
around for several years: <http://www.runrev.com/>
- ward
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