Re: [Help-smalltalk] (GUI) Dialog (and Cincom VisualWorks compat)

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2018-10-16 at 07:50, bill-auger wrote:
> the proliferation of dialects has been the bane of smalltalk since the
> early days - there have been efforts over the years to unify them
> in order to make the codes more portable but the efforts were mostly
> disjointed and none were universally adopted - it was even standardized
> by ANSI at one point and still to this day few smalltalk dialects
> follow the standard

Okay, and I guess Cincom’s one is a non-standard dialect as well…  So
isn’t “Dialog” used in some nearly compatible way by any system this
way?  or can’t it be because that would then either enforce a toolkit
library over another or prompt users for which one they want to use?

> on the other hand it is very simple in smalltalk to write wrappers
> around just about anything - GNU smalltalk has bindings to GUI toolkits
> such as GTK, but it can also interface with any native library; so it
> would be uncomplicated to write bindings to any other toolkit such as QT
> or whatever

Interesting …and I guess rewriting interfaces so that to make stuff
compatible mustn’t be that hard neither?

> if the task at hand is plainly "present a GUI dialog window to the
> user", then yes GNU smalltalk can already do that OOTB - surely it is
> not the exact name of the class that is important?

I tried to use GTK.GtkDialog but were unable to find how to do.  I
didn’t find anything related in the manual, and the fact I still don’t
know GTK+ nor Smalltalk must harden the task ^^'  What’s the canonical
way of doing this? so I can check if it works here (I heard there were
issues in some distributions…)… and maybe from that experiment so that
to do more stuff.