> > However, while Tk (the widget set) isn't bad, Tcl is a pretty
> limited language for UI development... Smalltalk is far superior. 
> Since Squeak is also free and very portable, it could potentially be a
> much better alternative in this "market".  It just needs some more
> work in the Windows/Mac look & feel area, plus Morphic being
> stabilized a bit more. 
> 
> On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Markus Kohler wrote:
> 
> I thought about that too. Tk has the advantage of being crossplatform.
> What's unclear to me is the license for Tk. I looked on their web page
> (www.scriptics.com) but didn't find any specific.
> 
> There are other problems too. I think it would be pretty hard to make
> native Morphic (based on Tk) and emulated Morphic compatible.

Actually, I wasn't advocating getting Squeak to support Tk (my paragraph
was a little misleading), I was just saying that if Squeak had a
reasonable set of Windows-like emulated widgets (in Morphic or MVC), it
could potentially be an alternative to the Tk family.  Mostly because
Squeak and Tk cover similar ground in terms of both being free and
oriented towards developing portable UI's with a higher-level language.
Squeak is obviously the more flexible/powerful of the two while Tk is more
commercially robust & industry-standard-UI friendly.

Creating a nice set of Windows-emulated widgets from scratch with Morphic
or MVC is no small task, I admit, and it wouldn't have to be part of the
base image.  Adding Tk support for Squeak is an interesting idea, and
might be easier than creating emulated widgets from scratch, but emulated
widgets seems more like the "ultimate" solution which would work on *all*
platforms... more in tune with the Squeak philosophy in that sense.

On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Georg Gollmann wrote:

> Please note that Squeak has perfectly usable error handling already
> (BlockContext>ifError:).

Sorry about that... I brought up exceptions as an example without really
knowing the details of how Squeak does error handling.  I'm familiar with
exception handling in other smalltalks, and had heard about an exception
handling goodie for Squeak, and noticed that Squeak had no Exception or
Signal classes, and kind of went from there... :-)

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net
  dway at transom.com
  http://www.transom.com