More about RADiola

[Fabricio Rocha <rocha_fabricio yahoo com br>]

	Guys, thank you very much for your opinions and the debate -- you are 
great. I just hope that this talk (more conceptual, less technical) does 
not bother the list members. If it does, please, tell me, and I will 
keep the discussion only in private e-mail messages.

        I'll try to address some things you have said:

	ROLAND: I just can NOT argue against your thoughts about flowcharts :) 
I am not sure if I had written this in the PDF I´ve published or if I 
wrote it later, but I say that the flowchart approach is very EASY, but 
not really PRACTICAL, indeed... It is just like "high-level Assembly", 
it is step-by-step. Sure, it is a feature for those who want to begin in 
programming (I really think about RADiola being used in primary schools, 
just like LOGO used to be there some time ago). But I am aware of this 
and, at least in the dirty plans in my insane head, RADiola will support 
the use of external, "normal" source-code files and even libraries -- 
they would NOT be embedded in the application script made by the 
AppDesigner module, but this file will have information about which 
subroutine to call for each event, their parameters, and where to find 
the respective code for the subroutine (just like the "includes" in C: 
they could be embedded in the case of "flowchart-made" routines, 
external source-code files or object libraries with header files). This 
information would be used by the Code Generator while preparing the 
source-code itself, and all this information should be passed to the 
chosen compiler and linker.

	ROLAND and MALAFAIA - "Aim lower", "start small"... I surely know what 
you mean, dudes -- if it is such a hard task even for experienced 
programmers, just wonder how I feel it!! And this is the reason why I 
just want to share an idea and "free" it -- I just can´t do it alone, 
and what motivates me is the desire of simply USING RADiola someday, and 
not the ambition of taking "solo credits" for it. But... I believe that 
something like RADiola is POSSIBLE. As I said, the "User Guide" refers 
to what te RADiola 1.0 version SHOULD be. Maybe it will never reach 1.0, 
of course. I will try to have *something* at first -- the control 
structures for variables and structure types, and the XML parseing to 
load/save information from/to those structures. Then I'll try to add 
features slowly, and then I hope that other people will want to join the 
project.

	ATANAS and ROLAND: I must admit I don´t know ONE SINGLE STATEMENT in 
Python. My programming knowledge is strict to C and ye ol'BASIC. The 
concept is that RADiola AppDesigner module will generate an XML file -- 
not simple, but only that. This file should be translated to source-code 
by an independent program, which I call "Code Generator". There could be 
a lot of Code Generators later -- the first one for C with GTK, maybe 
others for C++ with Qt, TCL/TK, Python with GTK... The Code Generator 
itself is, in concept, something which builds strings into a source-code 
file, using the values taken from the XML file.  Anyone could be able to 
create a Code Generator which would take this XML file and translate it 
to anything, and the RADiola user would be able to choose a Code 
Generator for the language he likes and knows most. I imagine that the 
RADiola Application Files idea could have other uses someday -- maybe an 
interpretator, or a "direct compiler", who knows.... And well, I have 
been thinking about the possibility of using dynamic libraries for the 
widgets toolkits. Those libraries could be something like the "runtime 
DLLs" of Visual Basic, providing widgets and procedures. But this is 
surely very much in the future...

	Guys, I am really pleased by all yor interest and contribution, 
specially because all we know some great free-software efforts which 
started just like that, and this is quite a boost! Thank you very much!

                
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