use gui to build gui

[Peter Achten]

Paul Dufresne wrote:
>So what I want to say is that now that Clean's have nice libraries
>to do nice user interfaces, it is time to hide these libraries to
>make programs to help design user interfaces.
>It is so good to open a user interface in an editor
>of user interfaces, to click on a button and see a window appears
>with a button for each event on that button (button pressed, button
>released, etc) and then just by clicking on the button 'button pressed'
>enter in a editor that show you the code to execute when that button
>is pressed.

Antonio Eduardo Costa wrote:
>To this end, she changed the code generator, in order to get a Clean
>program, instead of Java VM bytecode. She used the IO Library 0.8.
>The editor is acceptable, and I am using it to teach undergraduate
>students how to program in Clean. =20
>
>3) The third step was to build an editor using the Object IO Library.
>Ana couldn=B4t understand how to use the library to create dinamic
>menus and dialogs. She couldn't understand the hints that people sent
>her either...

Adrian Hey added:
>I tried to do similar things (create menus dynamically etc). I also failed
>miserably. Fortunately, I was only messing about and it wasn't particularly
>important to me, so penance in the Netherlands was unnecessary.
>
>It was frustrating though. I can't help feeling that this should have been
>as easy as list processing, but it wasn't. I think my problem (and Ana's)
>was lack of understanding of type systems and overloading more than FP.

I think it is a good idea to have a visual editor for Clean programs. Our
experience in teaching students how to use the Object I/O library is that=
 the
learning curve is steep. For one reason, this is caused by the fact that
the Object I/O library relies heavily on type constructor classes. These
are more difficult to comprehend and use than the algebraic data types used
for previous versions of the Clean I/O library, viz. 0.8. The use of a
visual editor that outputs equivalent Clean source code can be extremely
helpful both in education (as mentioned by Antonio Eduardo) and for
programmers.=20


Peter