Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!samsung!usc!apple!agate!saturn!golding
From: golding@saturn.ucsc.edu (Richard A. Golding)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2
Subject: Re: OS/2 PM Programming
Message-ID: <9989@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 10 Dec 89 03:52:46 GMT
References: <628894921.26415@minster.york.ac.uk>
Organization: U.C. Santa Cruz, CIS/CE.
Lines: 46

In article <628894921.26415@minster.york.ac.uk>, paulb@minster.york.ac.uk writes:
> Hi!  As there are a number of people in this newsgroup who obviously
> seriously program OS/2 PM, I thought I'd ask about how people find it as
> a programming environment.  
> ...  In truth, I
> found that I was very impressed by the system, and especially by the
> ease of writing PM programs.  Sure they're more complex than straight
> command-line style programs, but what wouldn't be?
> 

I suspect that the general observation is accurate that PM programming
has been trashed in the press because it's more complicated than
straight-line programming.  However, PM programming is far more painful
than it need be.  Having worked in four different windowing
environments -- PM, OpenView, X11 Xlib, and X11 toolkit (Xt), I have a
definite preference for Xt.  Several critical components of Xt are
simply far better designed than the equivalent parts of PM --
presumably the result of MIT and Stanford having iterated on the
problem of writing windowing applications for several years, then
having a significant fraction of workstation manufacturers provide input
before settling on any particular design.

For example, X uses a `translation manager' to govern the mapping
between external events and widget actions; a user or programmer can
reconfigure the event-to-action bindings as needed for any particular
application.  PM has no such facility.  Xt gets by with far fewer basic
kinds of widgets than PM does controls, because the widgets are
customisable.  Some of the Xt widgets are much better designed than
their PM counterparts -- the textWidget family, for example, is an
extremely flexible set of tools that can be composed to yield a number
of different kinds of multiple- and single-line text entry widgets,
whereas PM has the rather clunky MLE which has no composability.
(Concrete example:  if you want to edit a text file, with Xt you use an
asciiDiskWidget, which creates a `text source' of the file and uses a
standard `text sink' to display the information.  With PM you have to
handle loading the text into the control yourself.)

In summary, I'd say that PM programming probably isn't as bad as 
many people say it is.  But it's a lot more painful than it needs to
be.

-richard
-----------
Richard A. Golding, Crucible and  UC Santa Cruz CIS Board 
Internet:  golding@saturn.ucsc.edu 	
Work: {uunet | ucscc.ucsc.edu}!cruc!golding