I hate sending me-too posts, but I think Eric Ostrom's idea of having
a way to set the Tk names for STklos widgets is *extremely*
important. This is a shortcomming I've also ran into.
As he points out, when using STklos, one loses the Tk's X resource
initialization because the widget names are in some sense randomly
generated at run time. This is a burden on the user, because he can't
just configure the application the same way as others are configured,
and on the programmer, because he has to write some other method for
reading, writing and editing configurations.
His solution of passing a :name flag to allow the user to specify the
widget name looks to me to be quite clean and simple.
I'd go so far as to suggest modifying the MOP so that STklos classes
that are Tk widgets can specify that particular slots are to be
initialized by their corresponding X resources. I guess you'd want an
additional keyword on slot definitions, maybe :init-from-environment,
which would override :initform when the X resource exists. I didn't
call it :init-from-x-resource because I presume that under MS Windows
there's a different mechanism for specifying user defaults, but in
both cases they come from the "environment".
One question, though. What are you going to do about composite
widgets?
--
Dr. Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
abel_at_netvision.net.il
Received on Thu Sep 05 1996 - 15:41:34 CEST