(GUI) Dialog (and Cincom VisualWorks compat)

Hi,

In my college they’re teaching SmallTalk right now (which must be nice
since all what I’ve heard of it), but using a proprietary implementation
as I asked (which is not :/): Cincom VisualWorks, so I’m going to try
using GNU Smalltalk instead.

However I noticed (but I was told it’s not relevant until next semester)
some stuff such as a “Dialog” class (with calls such as “Dialog
warn:'error'” or “x := Dialog request:'a value'”, where x is a string,
from what I’m reading in their slides) wasn’t existing in GNU Smalltalk.

I’m under Debian (I’ve read there are some GUI issues on some distros,
I’d like to check how it is here, maybe try to fix it): is there some
way of achieving, as simply as possible, a similar behavior (as the one
I could guess: creating a dialog to prompt for or say something), maybe
with GTK?  Would it be trivial or not to have similarly named
classes/symbols (I’m unsure about the terminology, I’m from lisp) based
on those?

Thank you for any help!

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk

the proliferation of dialects has been the bane of smalltalk since the
early days - there have been efforts over the years to unify them
in order to make the codes more portable but the efforts were mostly
disjointed and none were universally adopted - it was even standardized
by ANSI at one point and still to this day few smalltalk dialects
follow the standard

on the other hand it is very simple in smalltalk to write wrappers
around just about anything - GNU smalltalk has bindings to GUI toolkits
such as GTK, but it can also interface with any native library; so it
would be uncomplicated to write bindings to any other toolkit such as QT
or whatever

if the task at hand is plainly "present a GUI dialog window to the
user", then yes GNU smalltalk can already do that OOTB - surely it is
not the exact name of the class that is important?

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk

On 2018-10-16 at 07:50, bill-auger wrote:
> the proliferation of dialects has been the bane of smalltalk since the
> early days - there have been efforts over the years to unify them
> in order to make the codes more portable but the efforts were mostly
> disjointed and none were universally adopted - it was even standardized
> by ANSI at one point and still to this day few smalltalk dialects
> follow the standard

Okay, and I guess Cincom’s one is a non-standard dialect as well…  So
isn’t “Dialog” used in some nearly compatible way by any system this
way?  or can’t it be because that would then either enforce a toolkit
library over another or prompt users for which one they want to use?

> on the other hand it is very simple in smalltalk to write wrappers
> around just about anything - GNU smalltalk has bindings to GUI toolkits
> such as GTK, but it can also interface with any native library; so it
> would be uncomplicated to write bindings to any other toolkit such as QT
> or whatever

Interesting …and I guess rewriting interfaces so that to make stuff
compatible mustn’t be that hard neither?

> if the task at hand is plainly "present a GUI dialog window to the
> user", then yes GNU smalltalk can already do that OOTB - surely it is
> not the exact name of the class that is important?

I tried to use GTK.GtkDialog but were unable to find how to do.  I
didn’t find anything related in the manual, and the fact I still don’t
know GTK+ nor Smalltalk must harden the task ^^'  What’s the canonical
way of doing this? so I can check if it works here (I heard there were
issues in some distributions…)… and maybe from that experiment so that
to do more stuff.

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk

On 2018-10-16 at 14:23, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
Is there a howto anywhere?  Or how am I supposed to use it? I’m not
knowledgeful enough of Smalltalk to find out myself :/  did anybody made
it work under Debian?

I’m going to try recompiling gst myself if that can helps get it working.

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk

On 2018-10-23 at 08:51, Garreau, Alexandre wrote: In the end I managed to open a windows this way:


(GTK.GtkMessageDialog new: nil flags: 0 type: 3 buttons: 0 message: 'This is a test.') run


But it opens a blank (actually gray) unclosable window, and I don’t know
how to use it farther…

> I’m going to try recompiling gst myself if that can helps get it working.

Did it, but until now it seems to perform just the same so I temporarily
make uninstalled it.

PS: is text/smalltalk the right mime-type for smalltalk programs? I
didn’t find any registered.

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk

On 2018-10-23 at 11:32, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> In the end I managed to open a windows this way:
>
> (GTK.GtkMessageDialog new: nil flags: 0 type: 3 buttons: 0 message: 'This is a test.') run


(GTK.GtkMessageDialog new: nil flags: 0 type: (GTK.Gtk gtkMessageQuestion) buttons: (GTK.Gtk gtkButtonsYesNo) message: 'This is a test.') present.
GTK.Gtk main.


Now it works by using “present” instead of “run” (I found it out by
trying out all unary messages) and then doing “GTK.Gtk main”.

Is that the supposed way to do? If so is there a way to run main
parallely so I can keep creating and destroying windows interactively at
the repl while seeing whatever I’m doing?  or is there a better way to
do so?

_______________________________________________
help-smalltalk mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk