Look and Feel... a red herring (Re: UNIX Expo in NYC)

[Guido van Rossum]

In article <2113 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I think the industry needs to establish a subset toolkit that does all
>the basic things (opening a window, getting events, rendering text and
>graphics, defining menus (in broad terms), poke points (gadgets, radio
>buttons, what have you), scroll bars, and so on) reasonably well. The
>equivalent of curses for window systems, if you like.
>
>Look-and-feel wars are going to go on as long as the old keyboard wars,
>with as much chance of being resolved. I don't give a damn what the look
>and feel is... I just want to write a program and have it run.
>
>I have seen references to something called "STDWIN", but don't know what
>state it's in or how to find out about it.

I agree with Peter.  Looks and Feels may come and go, but I don't want
to have to rewrite my code as the fashion changes.

I am also the author of STDWIN, so I could clarify any questions you
have about it.  It will certainly do a lot for you regarding insulation
from the application's look and feel.  How about me posting a summary of
its goals, functionality, availability etc. to one of these newsgroups?
It's about 400 lines, but worth reading.  STDWIN could be of use to
users of X11, Macintosh, Atari-ST, or (to some extent) any Unix box with
termcap.  Please send fan mail to the address below if you want me to
post it.

Adventurous souls can also go ahead and have a look at the source by
anonymous ftp to the machine gatekeeper.dec.com, whose IP address is
[128.45.9.52].
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido at piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl at uunet.uu.net