I have previously announced the existence of the RCLIB package in
Poplog, available at the free poplog site.
Without using any motif facilities, only the Poplog Widget Set, the
RCLIB package extends the X window interface utilities using Objectclass
(Pop-11's approximate equivalent to Lisp's CLOS). Although implemented
in Pop-11, RCLIB (Relative Coordinates graphic library) can be invoked
via the other poplog languages, Lisp, Prolog, SML.
WHAT'S RCLIB?
This allows construction of control panels, 2-D graphical facilities,
using mixtures of buttons, sliders, moving pictures, etc. using the
asynchronous event handling in Poplog to initiate and interact with
various kinds of programs, including the Poplog editor, Ved/Xved.
Because it is independent of motif it all works in the linux version of
Poplog. It can be combined with the image processing facilities in David
Young's popvision library, also included at the free poplog site.
NEW UTILITY:
I have recently added a new feature to RCLIB for which
testers/commentators/extenders would be welcome: a program browser,
which I think may be useful for students and others who are using Ved or
Xved and don't like using Ved's Emacs-like key sequences and ENTER
commands for moving around a file.
The browser builds a scrolling text panel showing all procedure headings
in the current file and gives a collection of action buttons for doing
things in the file: e.g. go to a procedure, mark a procedure, compile a
procedure, delete a procedure, reformat a procedure, go to next
expression, etc.
Moreover, being implemented in Pop-11, using a tool which does automatic
formatting of control panels, it is very "soft" and reprogrammable, so
it's easy to change the buttons, alter the fonts or size of the
scrolling text window, etc.
The new tool can be invoked from inside Ved by the command
ENTER procbrowser
Depending on the file extension, it runs either rc_procbrowser (the
original version, for Pop-11 programs) or rc_lispbrowser (a one day old
version, for lisp programs). I am not a lisp programmer, so I'd
particularly welcome comments on the latter.
The tool has a button to reconstruct its index for a new file, or for a
changed version of the original file.
A small amount of work (offers welcome) would produce a similar library
for Prolog, or for ML, possibly using some existing Ved procedures for
moving around program files in those languages.
The whole RCLIB package (which requires poplog) is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rc.tar.gz
[NOTE: 28 Sep 2010. This is now included in poplog and need not be
fetched and installed separately.]
To install, fetch and untar the package in $poplocal/local, and then
link $poplocal/local/lib/rclib.p to $poplocal/local/rclib/rclib.p
Then "uses rclib" in your init.p file makes the package available
via autoloading or explicit loading. Showlib can be used to examine the
code, etc. HELP and TEACH files provide documentation.
The documentation, especially the HELP RCLIB file, is still being
extended.
All of this can be browsed in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/
The above three programs are in the auto directories
rclib/auto/rc_procbrowser.p
rclib/auto/rc_lispbrowser.p
and the driver
rclib/auto/ved_procbrowser.p
As I am not a lisp user, I am not sure how useful the lisp version would
be. Likewise the Pop-11 version has not been tested by real users,
so feedback is welcome. I expect to use it for teaching beginners in the
coming term.
There is another "soft" extendable package, built on RCLIB, which
provides a whole host of autoloadable, mutually recursive, control
panels supporting various kinds of activities e.g. programming, browsing
documentation, reading and sending mail or news in Ved, spawning unix
programs, driving user programs, etc. in the RCMENU package. The
browsable version is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rcmenu/
and it can be fetched from:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/rcmenu.tar.gz
(This is now part of standard Poplog: 28 Sep 2010)
This requires, but does not include rclib.
All this is part of the free poplog site, which also includes complete
poplog systems (and sources) for various platforms, incluidng linux,
solaris on sparc or PC, and DEC Alpha + Unix.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html
Like most unix packages, this stuff can all be used remotely on a cheap
X terminal, or a PC running eXceed logged into a unix server, etc.
(It's often used like that for teaching.)
Comments suggestions, offers of improvement welcome. Please post
any queries to comp.lang.pop
Work is in progress on an improved set of facilities for installing
Poplog and running it without having to edit login files to set up
environment variables, etc.
A first draft of the latter can be found in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/man.tar.gz
which includes a poplog man file and a bin directory with a
posible shell script for starting up poplog without first setting
environment variables.
As indicated above there's now an http: route to the free poplog site
for those who find ftp a problem.
Aaron
===
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Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/
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