Re: GUI's for CommonLisp

[simon%lia.di.epfl.ch@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Simon Leinen)]

> P.S. Does anyone know if there is a CLX document for X11/R5?  All I
> have is the R3 version (1989) with a few patches for R4 and nothing
> for R5.  Are there CLX extensions that address scalable fonts, PEX,
> reading and writing PIXMAPS (instead of bitmaps), etc.?

The R5 tape contains documentation for CLX in mit/{doc,hardcopy}/CLX.
But I don't think the programming interface has changed since R3 (?).

Scalable fonts don't need support on this level -- the R5 Xlib does
not contain any either.  See Section 4 (Scalable Fonts) of the R5 doc
on the XLFD (Logical Font Description Conventions) in
mit/doc/XLFD/xlfd.tbl.ms on how to access scalable fonts.  At the
toolkit level, scalable font support would make sense; while Xt/Xaw
does not have any, Andrew 5.0 and presumably MOTIF 1.2 (when it's out)
offer this.

A PEX interface would be nice, but there isn't even a prefabricated
interface for the simpler extensions (like SHAPE) in CLX.  Since CLX
has not evolved as much as Xlib, there is now quite a functionality
gap: no color management, no authority file reading functions, no easy
access to extensions.  It would be great if CL vendors would
contribute such interfaces to the X consortium to make Common Lisp
more useful as a basis for UI development (of course I know all this
will be in CLIM 3.0 which everybody will be able to buy for a few
thousand bucks RSN)-: I hasten to add that CLX is very well designed
and much more convenient to use than Xlib.

X11R5 does not have a standard Pixmap file format yet.

> P.P.S. Why are bug-clx and cl-windows so dead?  

Good question.  For bug-clx one reason may be that there are so few
bugs in CLX left.  On the CLIM mailing list (requests to
<CLIM-request@BBN.COM>) there is quite a bit of traffic.  While
technically CLIM may be the best thing since sliced bread (according
to what you read on the CLIM-list), I believe there is still a market
for "poor man's" UI libraries in Common Lisp (like CLUE and Garnet).
Compare this to the C/X11 world where a lot of people still use the
Athena Widgets rather than MOTIF and OLIT.
-- 
Simon Leinen.
Laboratoire d'Intelligence Artificielle
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne