[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: [MACTCL] Re: Python/Tkinter and QuickTimeTcl

[Jim Ingham]

On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 02:06  PM, Steven Majewski wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Jim Ingham wrote:
>
>> BTW - IMO, much of the time C interfaces are not a good match for the
>> interfaces you want from a scripting language - the design goals are
>> different.  So this sort of autogeneration is mostly useful as a "first
>> cut" kind of thing.  For instance, Tk is MUCH more useful than a
>> straight wrapped version of Carbon would be.  Not sure whether this is
>> so true of AppKit since the API's are already at a pretty high level.
>> But I bet Tk would still in the end be more convenient...  Similarly,
>> QuickTimeTcl adds a movie object that you create and manipulate, which
>> is not the way the C API's are written, but is more convenient from
>> Tcl...
>
> From my experience playing with both Tcl/Tk (and Python/Tkinter)
> and Cocoa w/Python+pyobjc, I would say that if you have to do everything
> programatically (which is the case right now) then Tk is definitely
> easier than Cocoa, but if we can ever get Python+Cocoa  to work with
> Interface Builder nibs, then Cocoa would be much more convenient.
>

Yeah, it would be cool to be able to do what the AppleScript Studio 
folks do in other languages.  I don't know how this works, however, so I 
don't know how easy it would be to retool...

> Tcl/Tk is very procedure oriented, and the procedures to create and
> layout objects are very concise.
>
> Cocoa is very object oriented, and was really designed to work with
> I-B's 'frozen objects' -- if you have to actually write procedures
> to create all of your objects, then Cocoa becomes more of a pain to
> use.
>

Yes that's probably right.

>
> BTW: Jack's code is not as general purpose and flexible as SWIG, but,
>  being special purpose, it produces better wrapper code for MacPython.
>

I see...  The new version of SWIG looks pretty nice, particularly for 
wrapping C++ stuff (you can generate little Class factories, and then 
the methods hang off the created objects, which is convenient).  He says 
there is also support for ObjC, but I didn't see any docs about it.

Jim
--
Jim Ingham                                   jingham@apple.com
Developer Tools - gdb
Apple Computer