Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!turnkey!orchard.la.locus.com!prodnet.la.locus.com!jfr From: jfr@locus.com (Jon Rosen) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif Subject: Re: Is position n selected? Keywords: XmList, position, selected Message-ID: <23654@oolong.la.locus.com> Date: 19 Apr 91 18:51:28 GMT References: <1991Apr18.212904.21529@lgc.com> <1991Apr18.150819@wsl.dec.com> <1991Apr19.150134.22593@lgc.com> Organization: Locus Computing Corp, Los Angeles Lines: 64 In article <1991Apr19.150134.22593@lgc.com> cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird) writes: > > > >2. XmListGetSelectedPos(): this is EXACTLY > what I was seeking! What does it mean that > it was so hard for me to find it in the re- > ferences I have? > It means the obvious... that the Motif reference manuals are (to put it tactfully) not the best examples of their ilk that exist ;-) ... Frankly (hope you OSF guys are listening), there is too much repetition and not enough simple explanation in the Motif reference (1.0 and 1.1) manual... They obviously got carried away by the use of computer editors because the same verbiage is repeated over and over and over again in a variety of widget definitions (sometimes even grammar errors are repeated identically in several places) (aside: sometimes it makes me wonder if computerized word processing has done a service or disservice to the world... before computerization, at least someone had to read every word of a book before it was published, i.e., the typesetter... these days, there are probably large parts of similar manuals and books where much of the book has not been read by anyone, not even the author)... I long for a simple list of every function in a widget class and what it does (the new X/Xt/Motif quick reference that comes with the new X11R4 books is not bad, by the way)... By the way, as long as I am flaming and on the topic of XmList, we are in the process of implementing an XmSortedList-type of class that will provide keeping an arbitrary blocks of data in user-defined order and displayable with user-defined captions in an XmList... I think that Motif is seriously deficient in not having a sorted XmList capability... Finally, the term "charset" used with XmStrings is extremely unclear to first time readers... It is quite obscure that "charset" in fact relates to the fonts defined in a font-list... This could be explained much better in the documentation... It took me a long time to realize that we could display items in XmLists in different fonts by simply changing the charset spec for each XmString... Finally finally, why is XmText so broken? In 1984, when Mac came out, its text manager was clearly primitive... it did not support multiple fonts, multiple type styles, tabs, etc... This was flamed over and over again in various Mac programmer journals and mags... In order to do fancy text editing (i.e., word processing, etc.), you had to implement your own text manager... Release 6.0 of Mac fixed this problem and the current text manager supports full attributing of substrings within text, tabs, etc... Release 6.0 came out for the Mac several years ago (actually before Motif 1.0 was formally released...) Why then didn't Motif do XmText right, if not in 1.0, at least in 1.1? Basically, we are saddled with the same problems that Mac programmers suffered with for 5 years but which were cured in 1989... (flames off..) Jon Rosen ========================================================= "Another birthday? Well, don't worry about getting old until you can't make sense out of the simplest things... ... isn't it?" -- from my favorite 40th birthday card =========================================================