[M3devel] FW: Win32/ScrollerVBTClass.m3

Sun Dec 13 06:37:55 CET 2009

Jay:

My recollection is that I had multiple source trees to work with, including the then current repository, my original 4.1 source tree, and the modified 4.1 source tree we got from Farshad.  There may have been others; I don't remember; its been a while.  I also vaguely recall doing some comparisons against the DEC SRC sources, which I also had.

I never used mentor, so I can't comment there.

As far as whether Modula-3 is still ahead of its time, I think the work we are all doing is necessary if the language is to survive.  Right now, I think we are playing catch up in terms of having viable implementations on a sufficient base of modern OS and processors.  I still prefer Modula-3 as a language and I think it has a lot to offer.  

>From an educational standpoint, I can't think of a better language for one to learn good programming principles and practices.  Perhaps if more computer science students started out with Modula-3 the world would be a better place...

Back when Microsoft first came out with .NET, I seriously considered working on a Modula-3 implementation for .NET and talked with some folks at Microsoft about it, but my career and family kept me busy and I never got very far.

Regards,
Randy

>>> Jay K <jay.krell at cornell.edu> 12/13/2009 12:13 AM >>>
Randy, I get the feeling that Modula-3 was ahead of its time..but is it still?
I wasn't complaining that it took you 11 years, just that you'd have to be careful merging in such old stuff.
It's possible the other fork had changed a lot..though it appears it hadn't.
  Were you given the common base -- the unmodified file this was derived from -- or just left to diff it against 3.6 or 4.1?

Do you know by chance if mentor worked or when it did?
I was going to test RC2/3/4 here, but 1) some of the links are broken 2) even if they weren't, there's no "all" package to download, inconvenient. I rather suspect they are all broken here. But it could be "timing related" -- like, depend on when things appear on the screen or something..not sure what was NIL but I kind of suspect it might follow from things not displaying yet.

Again the posix and win32 code appears largely the same. Maybe the two files could be merged in order to share the parts that are in fact the same? Giving us maybe less code to maintain?
I know, it can go both ways. Sometimes in order to "merge" somewhat different code you have to "mess it up" with confusing "ifs", where splitting into two can lead to simpler code. It depends on the exact code and is subjective.

 - Jay

Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:12:21 -0500
From: rcoleburn at scires.com 
To: jay.krell at cornell.edu; m3devel at elegosoft.com 
Subject: Re: [M3devel] FW: Win32/ScrollerVBTClass.m3

Jay:

You would get opposition from anyone who likes Trestle and FormsVBT.  Really, the concepts, simplicity, and extensibility of Trestle/FormsVBT are very good and probably ahead of their time in terms of the then current state of commercial practice.

Ditching Trestle would not bode well for any of the work I've done.  I have a lot of cm3 code that runs on both Unix X-Windows and on Windows without any application source modification.

Indeed, having a GUI that worked on both types of platforms was one of the main selling points/features of the work we did in Modula-3 back in the late 90's.

Also, to follow up on my prior response, one of the reasons it took 11 years for me to incorporate the Win32 customizations had to do with licensing and also with standing up the repository after the demise of the commercial cm3 venture.  Not much had been done to these sources over the 11 years.  Mainly, I think most of the changes had to do with stuff that came out of PM3 and some bug fixes.  So, I had to get back into this code and do a real merge/integration effort taking care not to break anything.

Regards,
Randy

>>> Jay K <jay.krell at cornell.edu> 12/12/2009 10:46 PM >>>
eh, actually zchassis 3.6 matches current posix zchassis except for whitespace.
scrollertvbtclass is pretty close, though current adds "shadows".
Maybe we're ok in practise, but I still don't like it.

(Really I'd love to ditch Trestle in favor of Qt or such, but I have this nagging
feeling that Trestle reinvents far more than most other gui libraries.)

 - Jay

From: jay.krell at cornell.edu 
To: rcoleburn at scires.com; m3devel at elegosoft.com 
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:41:25 +0000
Subject: [M3devel] FW: Win32/ScrollerVBTClass.m3

2008-05-27 02:29  rcoleburn

  * m3-ui/vbtkit/src/: lego/m3makefile, vbtkitresources/ScrollBg,
    vbtkitresources/close.ppm, vbtkitresources/down.ppm,
    vbtkitresources/grow.ppm, vbtkitresources/left.ppm,
    vbtkitresources/m3makefile, vbtkitresources/right.ppm,
    vbtkitresources/up.ppm, lego/POSIX/ScrollerVBTClass.m3,
    lego/POSIX/ZChassisVBT.m3, lego/POSIX/m3makefile,
    vbtkitutils/m3makefile, lego/WIN32/ScrollerVBTClass.m3,
    lego/WIN32/ZChassisVBT.m3, lego/WIN32/m3makefile,
    vbtkitutils/POSIX/VBTKitEnv.i3, vbtkitutils/POSIX/m3makefile,
    vbtkitutils/WIN32/VBTKitEnv.i3, vbtkitutils/WIN32/m3makefile:

  Incorporate changes made to vbtkit by Critical Mass circa September 1997 that make the GUI appearance more like that of Windows.  The m3makefiles have been adjusted so that these changes affect only Windows (WIN32) platforms.  These changes were part of work sponsored by Randy Coleburn at Scientific Research Corporation (SRC).  The main files affected are VBTKitEnv.i3, ScrollerVBTClass.m3, and ZChassisVBT.m3, plus some new resource files have been added for WIN32 only.

Randy, are files from 1997 really correct to incorporate into the tree 11 years later? Or maybe they are rather out of date?
Can the work be redone against the 2008 versions? And factor out the common parts?

I guess I should go and diff these against the 3.6 or 4.1 versions?
And then apply those diffs to the Posix file to get the Win32 version?
(Or again, try to share what is the same?)

 - Jay

> Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 04:37:34 +0000
> To: m3commit at elegosoft.com 
> From: jkrell at elego.de 
> Subject: [M3commit] CVS Update: cm3
> 
> CVSROOT: /usr/cvs
> Changes by: jkrell at birch. 09/12/13 04:37:34
> 
> Modified files:
> cm3/m3-ui/vbtkit/src/lego/: Tag: release_branch_cm3_5_8 
> m3makefile 
> cm3/m3-ui/vbtkit/src/lego/WIN32/: Tag: release_branch_cm3_5_8 
> ScrollerVBTClass.m3 
> 
> Log message:
> I forgot to mention: I'm really just guessing here. It seems to work.
> 
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