Clean is loosing portability in favour of Windows :(

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira:

> ... Linux people
> do not seem to worry about portability, or about making their system
> user-friendly (at least, this is what a recent issue of 
> Scientific American says about Linux). 

1. This has a rather distant relation to the utility of having Clean
   running properly under Linux. 

2. This is a veeery dubious statement (to say it mildly). Of course,
   if "user friendly" means 
   "friendly for the most incredibly stupid and lazy people around"
   then this is true. But Linux is for *thinking* people. And I believe
   that Clean is also for people who think.

You mention openwin. Mon Dieu, who really cares? Even Solaris users
don't use openwin all of them. KDE is as good as CDE.

Actually, had I a bit more time, I would start constructing a portable
GUI for Clean adapted to X Window system *especially* for the
portability. Running it under Windows is very simple, there are free
servers around, and the development tools adapted to CYGWIN are
fairly portable.

BTW. if some difficulties are the result of incompatibilities between
graphical APIs of different systems, there is always a portable way,
or rather ways: pass through an intermediate layer.

DrScheme uses WX and it became the most portable Scheme in the world,
including interfacing etc.

Chez Scheme (including Petite) is augmented by a graphical layer
based on Tcl/Tk. Works everywhere.

I believe that even the 3D graphics is quite easy and portable, if
one really wishes. It suffices to plug-in the deep kernel of
OpenGL (Mesa or native). Very portable. (You don't need GLUT etc.,
Clean would provide the interfacing layer.)


==

Those things seem to be (for me) a bit more important both for the
commercial success of Clean, and for the development of the
"functional spirit" within the computing community, than, say -

implementing this or that language under Native Oberon, or other
exotic systems.

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France