Subject: RE: Scripting, formal docs and reliability
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Sat Jan 27 2001 - 23:20:27 CST
mike> Let's take the simple matter of inputting one character into a
mike> document. You just position the cursor where you want the
mike> insertion point (IP) to be and type away.
mike> Now, how would you do this in a (any) scripting language? You'd
mike> position the cursor at a specific IP and tell the the WP
mike> (AbiWord) to "insert these characters".
My direct experience is that this is an on-target observation, and
it's not really limited to thoughts of a scripting interface. There
are plenty of upper-layer things you might like to do as a C++
contributor, but it takes quite a bit of weeding through the low-level
bowels before you can do it (and even then you might not be sure you
got it right).
We have an object model that is sort of oriented toward telling the
states of things (this text is here, this attribute is turned on here,
this set of stuff is there), but there really isn't that much
abstraction of actions. To accomplish any action, you have to know a
lot about how all the state pieces relate to each other. Yes, some of
the action abstraction does exist, but it's spotty and hard to trip
across.
You can argue till the cows come home about details, but it's pretty
clear emacs got this right about a thousand years ago. You've got to
separate out the logical editing operations from all this plumbing
stuff.
So, I agree (and I don't really care that much one way or another
about scripting in AbiWord).
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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