Parrot-0.0.1

[Phil Hunt]

In article <slrn7s1cug.1vk.irclark at latveria.castledoom.org>
           irclark at latveria.castledoom.org "Isaac" writes:
> On Sat, 21 Aug 99 23:56:16 GMT, Phil Hunt <philh at vision25.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >It looks like version 0.0.1 of Parrot, my text-based GUI builder,
> >will be ready within a day or so. It doesn't actually do anything
> >useful yet; v0.0.1 is a technology demonstration version, which
> >is intended to verify that the basic design is more-or-less
> >sensible. Would anyone like to have a look at it, and possibly 
> >suggest some improvements? If so, tell me, and I'll put it on
> >my website.
> >
> >Some information about Parrot follows:
> 
> Very interesting indeed!  I was working on a similar program whose
> functionality would fit much of the description you give here.  My
> program reads in a description of a gui that's similar in concept
> to your par files, and outputs code that implements the gui, in
> either Motif, GTK, or the EZWGL

What's that?

> toolkit based on the backend chosen.   
> Currently the code is limited in the number of supported widgets. 
> I haven't tried to output anything but C code, but I don't see
> why other procedurally based languages wouldn't work.

My next step, once I'm happy with the parser and the HTML backend,
will be to write a Python/Tkinter backend. Then, I'll have written two
backends so I'll have a better idea of how to architect a backend 
framework -- I want to make backends easy to write, to encourage 
other people to contribute them.

> I haven't had time to work on my program lately, and the last time I
> looked at it, I really didn't like the syntax I'd chosen for the
> gui representation.   I'm using PCCTS to implement the parser for the
> language.

What language is your tool written in? AFAIK, PCCTS is a C parser
generator -- is this correct? How does it compare to yacc?

> I used a separate parser for implementing a language 
> for describing backends.  It's actually the language implementing part 
> that I find the most fun.  I barely learned enough about the various 
> toolkits to get the code output part working.

Yeah, the various toolkits can be quite hard to learn -- which is
why a gnerator is a useful idea.

> Looks like your seriously working on your program while I just can't
> find much time to continue.  (I just started an evening law school
> program.)  If you put the code up, I'd be happy to give you all the
> feedback I can. 

Looking forward to hearing it.

-- 
Phil Hunt....philh at vision25.demon.co.uk