Re: Windows stuff...
- Posted by Tommy Carlier <tommy.carlier at pandora.be> Sep 13, 2004
- 479 views
Patrick Barnes wrote: > To program in windows using only the standard libraries is very time > consuming and annoying. > Excellent work has been done in 3rd party projects like win32lib and > w32engine. > Some people find one or both of these restrictive, and so go off and > use a different system... > > This means that programmers are using different windows libraries to > write their own code, and to convert a library to use a different > windows library is difficult, if not impossible. > > What do you think about collaborating to produce a common core to > these windowing systems, that can be extended to produce a library > that caters to different needs? > > For a start, one include file should have every windows API constant, > and be compatible across the board. Perhaps it should be included in > the euphoria installer as a standard include. I agree that there is a need for a core library, but that library should be very limited. The API constants are necessary. But I think that it would be useful, if instead of a Euphoria-library, these definitions (constants, functions, structures) would be available as a database. Different libraries use different functions to define structures, and to load DLLs and functions. If the API definitions are available as a database, anyone could generate Euphoria-code from it. > From that, common procedures could be agreed upon. Some things are > common across all flavours of windows library - opening a dialog box > and getting a result, the concept of an event handler, low-level > routines like timers etc.... I don't totally agree with this statement: if you force such common procedures, people will be limited to write libraries that all look the same. What if one wants to write a library that doesn't use an event-system, or if it uses an event-system that looks totally different than the common event-system? If such a common event-system would exist, how would it look? I have to say: the Win32Lib event-system is easy to use and pretty advanced, but what's the point of writing a (revolutionary?) new library if you're going to stick with old habits. > The internals of the procedures and functions as implemented by > windows library designers do not have to be the same, but their > abstract behaviour should be the same, or similar enough to make > compatibility much easier. I disagree: the abstract behaviour of a Windows library should not be the same as any other Windows library. That's why I'm starting the new library: to make a library that doesn't suffer from backward compatibility (yet), and that implements some new features and ideas that haven't been implemented before. Compatibility can be a good thing, but is also very limiting. -- tommy online: http://users.telenet.be/tommycarlier tommy.blog: http://tommycarlier.blogspot.com Euphoria Message Board: http://uboard.proboards32.com