Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac.programmer:322 comp.lang.lisp:779
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!yale!ewing
From: ewing@yale.UUCP (ken ewing)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Allegro CL strangeness; info request
Message-ID: <25701@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 22:56:09 GMT
References: <23403@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: ewing@yale-celray.UUCP (ken ewing)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT
Lines: 42
Summary:

Expires:

Sender:

Followup-To:

Distribution:

Keywords:


In article <23403@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> mkent@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Marty Kent) writes:
>(Don't know whether rec.jokes mightn't be a more suitable forum for this
>request, but this is serious...)
>
>After having some problems with output in a standard (i.e. non-Fred,
>non-Listener) window, I notice in the Allegro manual where is says under
>"Drawing Text" (pg. C-7) "Special characters such as return (i.e. from
>TERPRI...) have no effect."

That's because the function stream-tyo  simply calls the Mac trap _drawchar
after setting the current port to the port of the window object which you
asked to stream-tyo.  _Drawchar, however, doesn't do "formatting", because
"No formatting (such as carriage returns and line feeds) is performed by
Quickdraw." [Inside Macintosh 1, 172; strangely mentioned only under
the _Drawstring heading].  Anyway, since plain-vanilla windows are LISP
streams of element type string-char, they should support terpri, fresh-line,
format with ~%'s, etc.

But of course, fred-windows do support them fully.  Which brings me to wonder
why you would rather not use fred-windows:  Are you trying to do text boxes
within standard windows?  If so I strongly suggest that you use the Mac tool-
boxes TextEdit routines for handling drawing characters, scrolling, text
selection, etc.  I've had to use boxes of editable text for a program that
I am writing, and rather than dive into the Mac I chose to use fred-windows
by making sets of windows appear and react as single windows -- a gigantic
hack, that even works ok, but NOT WORTH IT.  The right way is definitesly to
create a user-dialog-item class of TextEdit text boxes, something that Coral
should have done for us.


>Marty Kent     Sixth Sense Research and Development
>               415/642 0288    415/548 9129
>               MKent@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu
>               {uwvax, decvax, inhp4}!ucbvax!mkent%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu
>Kent's heuristic: Look for it first where you'd most like to find it.

ken ewing   ewing@cs.yale.edu   ewing@yale.UUCP

PS:  Boy am I glad to see some Coral Common Lispers out there: I don't
     know 'bout you others, but I've been lonely trying to learn how
     to program this micro with its fancy graphics interface from LISP,
     of all languages!  :-) :-)