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From: asente@wrl.dec.com (Paul Asente)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: floats and XtSetArg
Message-ID: <1990Jul3.231215.25447@wrl.dec.com>
Date: 3 Jul 90 23:12:15 GMT
References: <9007021151.AA13264@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Sender: news@wrl.dec.com (News)
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab
Lines: 25

In article <9007021151.AA13264@expo.lcs.mit.edu> sheehyjp%v701.DECnet@NUSC.NAVY.MIL ("V701::SHEEHYJP") writes:
>
>	I'm in the process of writing my first widget and I would like to use
>a variable type float as one of my resources.  I have the converter (I'm using
>R3) and everything works fine when I use the default or if I place the float
>in a resource file, but when I try to hard code a value in my application
>using XtSetArg, the widget always gets a zero.  How can I use XtSetArg to
>send a float to my widget?  I hope there is someone out there who can help.

You *really* don't want to do this.  *Really*, *really*, *really*.

By now you've probably seen the other responses that show you how to make
this work, so I won't go through them again.  But do you want to make everyone
who uses your widget have to go through all that complexity?

Consider either creating a new resource type, a pointer to a float (you
should still be able to create a converter just fine, but you'll also
need a destructor) or replacing the resource with two integers, either
numerator/denominator or value/scale.

It's unfortunate that specifying float resources is so hard, but it is.
Better to avoid them than to constantly expose the problem to people.

	-paul asente
	    asente@decwrl.dec.com	...!decwrl!asente