DLL Absence and SWIG comment

Richard Leddy rleddy at svn.net
Mon Aug 11 06:20:00 EDT 2003


Thanks to all for directing me to MetaCard FTP.
Yes, the interface to the rest of the world obviously did
not get much attention in the external implementation,
but it is a place to start. To see this stuff takes me back
about ten years.

While getting frustrated about Revolution last night,
I spent some time looking at openOffice.org. Very
interesting. Do they support CORBA? Do they compile?
Do they have a small memory footprint? Do they use a language model
other than Basic? I tried to download the source.
36Mb. My cheesy TCP/IP card broke down 75% of the way
through after 50min. OpenOffice is on all platforms.

But, what is the revolution advantage? I have scripted
SuperCard and VisualBasic and Director. Used Java.
I think it is best to tie the script to the object.
VB puts it into one script. It appends names to handlers.
A script per object leaves you with the universal event lingua -
events as axioms rather than afterthoughts. Also, VB attempts object
typing in a cumbersome way. LISP like indiscretion seems better
when dealing with molar objects like buttons, or polygons, etc.
The discourse about such objects does not seem to need machine
level characteristics for types.  So, with Revolution and precursers,
you get property management of objects as way of managing types; that's 
the way to go.

However, strong typing is useful in predicting the efficiency of
an algorithm. So, external libraries are needed. STL and templating in 
C++ has lead to excellent portability. Also, progamming is quite 
productive in this realm, but not for graphic displays. STL does not 
address visualization, for example.

So, the two programming approaches can be quite symbiotic and 
complementary; the two being semantic scripting and hard computation. 
There needs to be externals.

SWIG is quite impressive. I think I will experiment with it. Of course 
it does not address what CORBA addresses, which is a transparency of the 
the tier formation behind seemlessly integrated API's. That is, SWIG 
puts the function in the build, but does not assume the function may be
executed on another machine in another town. Both SWIG and CORBA would 
make a big difference to Revolution. CORBA is already accepted in 
enterprise development. (Perhaps I missed something about CORBA in 
Revolution?)


Thoughts.... It's getting late. Thanks again.




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