Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!swick
From: swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: another annoying question
Message-ID: <8803251315.AA13364@LYRE.MIT.EDU>
Date: 25 Mar 88 13:14:59 GMT
References: <8803250433.AA09455@violet.berkeley.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 11

> I've got a question about the semantics of "boolean" resources (I.E.
> on or off). Most code just checks to see if something is defined
> for a given name,

I don't think this is reasonable behavior, and neither does the Xt
ConvertStringToBoolean representation conversion routine.  There is
no resource file syntax for removing a resource from the database, so
the user running an application that only checked for the presence/absence
of a resource specification would have no way to negate a boolean
that was set by a more global default specification (for example,
in a site-wide resource file).