Xref: utzoo comp.windows.x:11191 comp.windows.news:1426
Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!mike
From: mike@ists.ists.ca (Mike Clarkson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x,comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Lisp X Server (was Re: GWM and Other things)
Message-ID: <118@ists.ists.ca>
Date: 28 Jun 89 01:47:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: ists.118
References: <8906201951.AA01028@wscad4.local> <22675@news.Think.COM>
Reply-To: mike@ists.UUCP (Mike Clarkson)
Followup-To: comp.windows.x
Organization: Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science
Lines: 35


In article <22675@news.Think.COM> barmar@kulla.think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>Actually, I suspect you're trying to invent a way to give X the
>expressive power of NeWS.  NeWS has the ability to download PostScript
>procedures to the server and then have it execute them.  For instance,
>this would allow you to download all the workings of a pop-up menu, so
>that the client would only have to say something like "mark (Item1)
>(Item2) (Item3) MenuChoose", and the server would pop up the menu,
>wait for the user to choose something, and then return the choice to
>the client (in X this has to be done on the client, usually in a
>widget library).  For those of us who prefer prefix polish to reverse
>polish it would be nice if there were a Lisp window system of this
>sort (maybe the CLIM work being done by ILA, Symbolics, Lucid, and
>Xerox will include something like this).

I agree with Barry.  I've been hacking on NeWS called from Scheme, and
it's remarkable the similarities between PostScript and Lisp.  They
are both weakly typed languages with automatic garbage collection.
The reverse polish notation is a rather superficial difference relative
to the fact that PostScript is explicitly stack based.

Given the fact that NeWS source is cheap for universities (~1000$), it
strikes me that it would not be a too difficult problem to make a 
Lisp front end to a PostScript interpreter.  It would make a great
Master's or Ph.D. project, and one could take advantage of a lot of PD
Lisp based debugging tools to make a really decent windowing environment.

Mike.


-- 
Mike Clarkson					mike@ists.ists.ca
Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science	uunet!attcan!ists!mike
York University, North York, Ontario,		FORTRAN - just say no. 
CANADA M3J 1P3					+1 (416) 736-5611