Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!natinst!bigtex!nueces!chari
From: chari@nueces.UUCP (Chris Whatley)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Iconitis
Summary: See mathematica...
Message-ID: <277@nueces.UUCP>
Date: 25 Apr 89 04:41:51 GMT
References: <3847@ficc.uu.net> <6800003@ugun21>
Lines: 37

In article <6800003@ugun21>, josef@ugun21.UUCP writes:
> There was a rather interesting talk at the recent EUUG conference in
> Brussels (Belgium) on splitting a program into two parts
> - the functional part
> - the user interface

> In doing this, You can use the functional part as a filter or inside
> a shell script.
> Buit IMHO this also will allow You to
> - use different user interfaces (icons, menus, command line args)
> - run functional part and user interface on different machines.

If you have ever seen or used Mathematica on a Unix machine, you have seen
this in action. I am not *absolutely* sure of all of this but, the copy of
Mathematica I have used on my NeXT includes the files that would allow
you to run either the NeWS, NeXTStep or Suntools graphics interfaces.
Of course you can't do these *on* the NeXT, only with the Sun (or whatever)
connected to the NeXT running the Kernel. (I have no idea why you would
want to use a NeXT for this though. Math is not especially speedy with
the 68882.)

In all implementations of Mathematica (that I know of) you run the
Kernel and the user interface as different entities and they communicate
with ascii text. So, I can run the kernel on a supercomputer and use the
interface of my NeXT to interact.

Also,a simple tty interface is available which could be used in a script
though it would be a bit slow since the kernel is so large and slow to load.
Not something I recommend but, it is there.

This way you have a choice of interfaces. A Mac or NeXT with notebooks (text
and graphics in the same window), a Sun or DEC 3100 (etc..) with a tty
interface for text and graphics in a separate window or terminal
interaction only.

Just my 2 francs,
Chris