Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!spdcc!tauxersvilli!alphalpha!nazgul From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: To UIL or not to UIL? Message-ID: <1990Feb18.175510.10634@alphalpha.com> Date: 18 Feb 90 17:55:10 GMT References: <11658.632634712@hplnpm> <1240@zip.eecs.umich.edu> Organization: Alphalpha Software, Inc. Lines: 66 In article <1240@zip.eecs.umich.edu> anon@eecs.umich.edu (Omar S. Juma) writes: >In article <11658.632634712@hplnpm> mayer%hplnpm@HPLABS.HPL.HP.COM (Niels P. Mayer) writes: >I absolutely agree. I've only had 4 years of serious software experience, and >UIL is the ***worst*** language/compiler combination I have ever seen. Nothing, Agreed. >* The UIL compiler does not invoke cpp before it starts its journey. Yo, DEC!!! Ah, the reason there is simple. VMS doesn't have cpp, and guess what group wrote UIL! > [Quiz of the decade: Where did DEC come up with 132? What, is it 128 and a bit?] Anything longer than that can't be printed on a line printer (remember those?). > BASIC and FORTRAN, because that's as sophisticated as it ever gets. The > language is extremely simple-minded. No conditional processing. No interface > actions. No anything. All UIL offers is a substitute to writing out almost Remember, this is a presentation description language, not a dialog description language. UIL is a misnomer, and it is *not* a UIMS, and never claimed to be. My objection is that for such a simple language, it requires an incredible amount of syntax. By comparison the parser for Open Dialogue takes a much simpler, much easier to learn language, and does a lot more with it. > Which brings me to wonder why OSF never gave Open Dialogue any serious > consideration (please, don't tell me about "demonstration technology"). > If not the entire Open Dialogue system, then at least the language, which was We did, believe me we did. I was part of the team that chose Motif, and believe me I've regreted UIL from day one. We did consider Open Dialogue, and we did consider just taking the parser. In fact the informal agreement was that a preprocessor would be written that used Open Dialogue-like syntax on top of UIL, but evidentally that fell by the way-side. Open Dialogue had too main negatives, one was C++ (I know, it's there, I'm writing products in it, but the OSF Membership didn't think so), the other was that Open Dialogue wasn't using widgets. Yes it could be converted, but that gave people a bad impression. But anyway, believe me, the consideration was serious. > several generations ahead of UIL. My personal impression is that DEC shoved > UIL down OSF's throat as its "contribution", though in effect all it's done > is cause people to waste inordinate amounts of time and effort creating > workarounds. I can't say anything about the deliberations (in fact, I've probably already said too much) but I know that *I* felt that with a new front-end UIL would be usable and useful. My disapointment is that OSF didn't devote the resources to do it, and that now it may be too late (unless someone puts one in the PD real soon). >* Extensibility. Are you kidding me? Extend UIL? I'd rather go gene > splicing than try to tack on more crud to UIL. DEC has supplied what Agreed, the UIL compiler is special-cased up the wahzoo. I tend to like your suggestion of starting all over again with a new compiler for the UID files, although I'm afraid it may be too much work. Putting a front-end on things at least gives some compability, although it does leave you with the back-end hacks. -kee -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Alphalpha Software, Inc. | Voice/Fax: 617/646-7703 | Home: 617/641-3805 | | 148 Scituate St. | Smart fax, dial number. | BBS: 617/641-3722 | | Arlington, MA 02174 | Dumb fax, dial number, | | | nazgul@alphalpha.com | wait for ring, press 3. | BBS line is still dead | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+