Re: [Octal-dev] octal's tracker heritage [was re: text params]

[Dave O'Toole]

Edward Coffey wrote:
> 
> I thought all this was going to be taken care of by widgets and "ox_desc"
> anyway.  If the user is not comfortable with hex, they can just drag a
> "slider" and watch the (hopefully more friendly) feedback given by the

Right... nobody is going to ask you do actually do math in hex :-). 

> machine's "ox_desc".  As for representations of "small" and "large" in the
> tracker matrix, perhaps there could be an option in the GUI to display the
> raw hex, the result of "ox_desc", 

(the status bar will display an ox_desc for the value under the cursor,
like buzz does)

> or a mini widgit possibly something like a
> progress bar, showing empty for 0 and full for FF or FFFF for "small" or
> "large" respectively.

How could such a thing be edited, though? The slider will be taken care
of by the "control boxes", which are the little slider-heavy dialogs
that come up in Buzz when you double-click a machine. But having
anything other than digits in the tracker matrix demands an answer to
how the user will edit such a representation. When it's digits, the user
puts the cursor over the desired digit and types the new one.  

Displaying the result of ox_desc in a tracker column makes no sense
because there is no way for octal to edit this user-defined string and
have the result be meaningful. The ox_desc string has a format that is
totally defined by the machine. The same goes for putting widgets in a
tracker column, I think... unless it has predictable editing semantics,
there is really no way to make it work. 

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal