interpreter improvements

[Chris Barker]

Brendan Hahn wrote: 
> Chris Barker <chrishbarker at home.net> wrote:
> >Frankly, IO've also bee dissapointed in the MacPython communities
> >commitment to cross-platform tools. tkInter works on Windows well
> >because Window users have made sure that it does, ditto for wxPython,
> >etc. No one in MacPython development is working on those things.
> 
> It isn't fair to hold the MacPython community responsible for this -- the
> problems are not so much with Tkinter and wxPython but rather with the
> underlying Tk and wxWindows implementations, which both kind of work but
> basically suck on the Mac.

Fair enough, but the responsibility still lies with the Mac programming
community in general, if not just MacPython: if tcl-tk and wxWindows
don't work very well on the Mac, it's because the Mac programming
comunity, as a whole, has not made them work well. By the way, wxMac has
gotten a lot more support, and is making a lot of progress lately.

> Even with a good Tk or wxWindows library, the
> differences in interface paradigm, event models, etc, make it very hard to
> get  the kind of application a Mac developer wants from these systems, so
> work goes into the "native" interface stuff like W and the W-based IDE.

Essentially what you are saying is that good cross platform tools that
include the Mac are impossible to create. That may be true: after all,
no one seems to have created one yet. I hold out hope for wx. while tk
was designe3d for X-windows and then later ported to other platforms, wx
was designed to be platform independent in general. Of course, it was
designed with just Win32 and Motif as targets to begin with and thus is
kind of Windowsy, but it is pretty usable and powerful.

> Unfortunately the relative smallness of the Mac community means these tools
> are not as highly developed as Tk- and wx-stuff.

That's why I'm surprised that there isn't more work put into the cross
platform stuff, if you get that to work, you get a whole lot with the
package! 

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
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