[Openmcl-devel] FScript contribution

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Joerg Garbers wrote:

> Hi,
> - Writing scripts for Cocoa classes is very easily done in FScript (see
> http://www.fscript.org).
> - I find the reader macros for cocoa very useful, but still a little
> difficult to read.
> - FScript comes as dynamic library (FScript.framework) with a lot of
> goodies and documentation.
> - So why not connecting OpenMCL and FScript to call FScript from
> OpenMCL and vice versa?
> This is done in the file attachment.
>
> Joerg
>
> BTW:
> 1. Whoever wrote the cocoa examples, thanks a lot!

I think that the examples show that it's possible to write fairly
interesting Cocoa programs without writing a whole lot of code.

I think that the fact that the examples have pretty much stood
still for several months might indicate that there needs to be a
layer or two above the reader macros and glue that exist now.
(It's neat to be able to write code in what looks like a hybrid
of lisp and ObjC syntax, but I'd like to be able to write lisp
code that provided a user interface and ignore all of the low-level
details of dealing with the ObjC/Cocoa runtime.)



> 2. Does anybody know, if the commercial MCL supports cocoa classes
> (windows etc.) too?

I think that this'd be hard:

  1) Commercial MCL uses different shared library technology (PEF/CFM
     vs Mach-O/dyld).  It's possible to open and use dyld libraries
     from MCL (and people have done some interesting things in that
     regard), but integrating the two technologies well starts to get
     complicated.

  2) Cocoa makes pretty heavy use of certain C idioms (passing structures
     by value, for instance) that MCL's FFI doesn't handle well.

  3) I get a headache thinking about how Cocoa UI objects would fit
     in with MCL's traditional Carbon view of the world.  I realize
     that Jaguar offers some support for embedding Cocoa objects
     in Carbon applications, but I still get a headache ...

>
> fscript.lisp (to be put into the ccl/examples folder):

Thanks; it's in CVS now.


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