Thanks Jim,
That discussion has given me a lot of confidence that I _can_ fit
the GUI world into my mental framework.
Also thanks to Matthew, Mike and Jamie, for their suggestions.
On 2 May, Jim Hague wrote:
> Handling a situation where you have some big slab of computing to do can be
> tricky on a GUI. If the calculate can be broken down into bite-sized chunks,
> you can use a periodic timer to trigger doing bits at a time. Otherwise
> spawning a calculation thread is on the agenda.
Hmm. Threads/processes... Maybe my initial impulse wasn't so
off-the-wall after all, then: I was going to write an
etch-a-sketch program that understood a simple graphics language
(semantically equivelant to the Tek's graphics commands) and
plotted the result. I'd then have the fractal image generation
part run as a separate process, piping it's result to the grapher.
That wouldn't be _too_ inefficient, because the stdio and pipe
buffering would decouple the two nicely.
I actually used that technique for an assignment for second year
(?) computer science: We had to do some 3D scene drawing, and the
only graphics library that we were allowed to use only had
Modula-2 bindings. The Modula-2 compiler was too buggy to handle
my whole application, though. So I (re)wrote my application in C,
and wrote a "graph drawer", as I described above, in one page of
Modula-2. Worked like a bought one.
I bet that such a thing already exists.
--
Andrew
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