Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!stan!marvin!toml From: toml@marvin.Solbourne.COM (Tom LaStrange) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: OPEN LOOK announced first (was: Re: Motif/Openlook, is there a trend? Message-ID: Date: 4 Feb 91 13:57:53 GMT References: <1991Jan23.164403@ecovsb.ncsu.edu> <2977@sodium.ATT.COM> <1991Jan30.211330.12990@sq.sq.com> <1991Feb3.025211.8461@alphalpha.com> Sender: toml@Solbourne.COM (Tom LaStrange) Organization: Solbourne Computer, Inc. Lines: 43 In-Reply-To: nazgul@alphalpha.com's message of 3 Feb 91 02:52:11 GMT It must be Monday :-) Decision Criteria Added After the Membership Feedback Meeting Intrinsics Based Solution [based on a desire for an object-oriented approach and previous moves in this direction by NIST and X/Open]. Implementation Language [stick with C for now, not C++]. Open Architecture [viable for at least 5 years] Aren't "object-oriented" and "C" mutually exclusive? Here's a great quote from the Xt tutorial at the 1988 X Technical Conference. "C is inadequate for object oriented programming" Charles Haynes and Joel McCormack, Digital Equipment Corp. For the record, I'll state again that I think Sun's biggest mistake was in trying to release N toolkits on the unsuspecting world. It's all very fine to say Open Look is toolkit independant - so's Motif, and there are at least four Motif-compliant (to one extent or another) toolkits in existance* - but OSF is only selling one, and there's only one which I have to worry about being supported when I move from platform to platform. With Open Look I have no idea which the vendor will support. Does _Sun_ even claim to support anything other than XView? I doubt it. Their version of libXt.a has pathnames that point at /usr/lib/X11, but the version of SunOS4.0 I've used doesn't even have that directory. That doesn't look like support to me. I love this statement. The ONLY Motif-compliant toolkit is the one produced by OSF. I don't want to speak for OSF and they can correct me if their policies have changed but OSF will not and has no plans to certify other toolkits as "Motif-compliant". I asked an OSF person last October if they planned on certifying any other toolkits and the response was: "Why would we want to do that?" The only thing those of us struggling to provide a Motif-like toolkit can say is that you can write Motif compliant applications with the toolkit. That's it. -- Tom LaStrange toml@Solbourne.COM