Python on riscos

[David Boddie]

paul at boddie.net (Paul Boddie) wrote in message news:<23891c90.0108210156.45aeb35b at posting.google.com>...
> Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com (Gareth McCaughan) wrote in message news:<slrn9o2rak.2vt.Gareth.McCaughan at g.local>...
> > 
> > By the way, I have a hazy recollection that someone *did* port
> > some, at least, of Tk to RISC OS. I don't know how easy it would
> > be to make the Python port work nicely with it, and I don't
> > now remember how complete the port was or who did it or anything
> > useful like that.
> 
> I believe that Chris Stretch, in the earlier port of Python for RISC
> OS, decided that Tk was too difficult to port, given certain
> limitations of the RISC OS Desktop environment (no nested windows at
> that time), so he invented a new toolkit (whose name eludes me, but it
> started with T, I think) which was incompatible with Tk.

Do you mean Shade? ;-)

> It might be interesting to review the Mac OS port of Tk to see whether
> a RISC OS port is viable, given that Mac OS is possibly the closest
> platform to RISC OS architecturally that Tk has been ported to. An
> alternative solution would be to follow the anygui project
> (http://anygui.sourceforge.net) and implement the proposed API using
> calls to the underlying Desktop API.

This is an interesting project. Looking at the API which inspired
their's reminds me of the system I wanted to implement, namely that of
documents with multiple views:

http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui/

It will be quite challenging to bring across some of the ideas to RISC
OS, since the way some mechanisms are implemented on RISC OS, such as
menu selection, require information to be stored globally (within a
GUI module anyway).

David