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Re: CLIM 2.0 -- How portable is it?


> From att!BBN.COM!hilly.harlequin.com!harlequin.com!swm Thu Jun 30 16:43:15 1994
> From: Scott McKay <swm@harlequin.com>
> Date: Thu, 30 Jun 94 11:35:42 EDT
> To: msb@eos.arc.nasa.gov
> Cc: clim@BBN.COM
> Subject: CLIM 2.0 -- How portable is it?
> Content-Length: 2431
> 
[...]
> 
> CLIM 2.0 will work the same way on Symbolics, Lucid, Harlqn, and under
> MCL (if that ever comes out).  For stupid reasons, Franz is the odd
> man out, although that certainly does not imply that Franz is in the
> wrong in cases where it differs from the S/L/H/M version.  It would be
> helpful if you could send reports of any such incompatibilities (to
> this mailing list, I guess) when you find them.
> 
My 2 cents,

It is extreemly important for the future of CLIM2.0 that it
remain consistent across platforms and follow a common standard
interface provided by all vendors. Vendors should
document additions in a CLIM-EXTENSIONS package (not in CLIM-USER).
We, users, will always need access to several multiple vendors since
a single vendor cannot provide rapid enough response to many
different requests from a variety of projects that exercise
different parts of CLIM (CLIM 2.0 offers such a broad spectrum
graphical interface constructs). Idealy CLIM 2.0 should start
resembling a consortium [again] or it will be replaced by a less
flexible implementation of the same ideas in some other kind of "object
-oriented" language! Remember, that's what happened to Macsyma with
Mathematica and Mapple more or less!!

I have tried three different vendors of CLIM (4 including Symbolics)
and they all behaved differently, and broke in different places
[that was when CLIM was changing rapidly]... Now that
things have stabilized [even in the most broken places], let's iron
out the differences. All vendors will benefit from their users
applications transparently porting between HL or Franz UNIX CLIM2.0
versions, Lucid's MCL and Franz CLIM PC... The first
vendor available on a new computer platform should take the lead
of that market, and there are enough possible platforms to keep both
the vendors and the users busy! And by the way if CLIM 2.0 does not
make it to other platforms soon (i.e. MAC PC) other less usable tools
will take over non-the-less (things called Visual XXXX?).

Olivier Clarisse
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