[Rd] RE: [R] GUI support from R
Prof Brian D Ripley
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Sun, 2 Sep 2001 07:39:48 +0100 (BST)
On Sun, 2 Sep 2001, Byron Ellis wrote:
> IMHO the wrong question is being asked here---it is not a matter of
> underlying toolkit. We could literally spend the rest of our lives arguing
> over toolkit, especially since toolkits come in and out of fashion (X
> widget sets come to mind...), stopped being developed and start again
> (wxWindows had a period of stagnation if I recall) or undergo radical
> changes (gtk as mentioned). Rather I think what really needs to be decided
> is a uniform R level mechanism for GUIs, something philisophically to
> Java's AWT design. In the AWT case, the underlying aspects of the Java
> toolkit representation are implemented using the appropriate system-level
> toolkit (Motif on UNIX, Win32/GDI on Windows,
> I-Forget-The-Name-of-the-MacOS-Windowing-API and so on). Once that toolkit
That's how Tcl/Tk does it.
> has been established then discussions over underlying toolkit become moot
> except for people who want to maintain R's GUI facilities on platform
> foo.
Rather, it becomes moot for people who want such facilities. I suspect
noone wants to maintain them .... That Tcl/Tk needs a different low-level
interface on different platforms is a pain: the original R tcltk package
code runs on a call that only exists in Tcl/Tk for Unix. If that were to
happen again, I am pretty sure that Tcl/Tk would be omitted from the
Windows port of R (and I believe it is from the Classic Mac port).
[...]
Event-loop integration is a major issue with GUIs, and it's a toolkit
issue. R is designed to run an event loop and wants to be in control.
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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