[XForms] Discussion concerning development
Jens Thoms Toerring
jt at toerring.de
Fri Mar 14 07:16:11 EDT 2008
To subscribers of the xforms list
Hello,
going through parts of the code of XForms some things
got me puzzled and I would like to ask about your opinion:
a) It seems to be assumed that the compiler used to comile
XForms isn't even ANSI C89 compatible. This might have
been a problem at the time the XForms project was star-
ted, but nearly 19 years after this standard came out
is this something we still have to care about? Is there
anybody out there still using a pre-C89 compiler and
where for example realloc() called with a NULL pointer
as the first argument isn't the same as a call of
malloc() (i.e. the libc isn't ANSI C89 compliant)?
b) In lots of places fixed upper limits exist, starting with
the maximum number of forms (a limitation I already have
removed), the number of popup menus and there entries,
number of file selectors, line lengths in text browsers
etc. etc. I don't know if these "arbitrary limits" were
introduced because the original authors didn't feel too
comfortable with dynamic memory allocation or if it was
assumed that having fixed sized arrays would simply be
faster (especially in the "old times" when memory allo-
cation handling wasn't that optimized as it tends to be
today).
I am rather strongly opposed to arbitrary limits where-
ever they can be avoided since todays reasonable limits
can be a headache tomorrow ("Who will ever need more than
600kB of memory?") and would try to change the code as far
as possible to abvoid them. On the other hand I may not
be seeing the complete picture and these limits may have
some beneficial effects I am not aware of. Does anybody
see some good reasons for keeping them?
Another point I am not too happy about some of the default
looks of XForms. For example I find that the default border
width of 3 pixels looks plain ugly - ten years ago pronounced
3D effects may have been the the rage, but nowadays it looks
to me pretty old-fashioned. Would anybody mind if I would re-
duce the default border width from 3 to 2 (I personally would
prefer 1, but that might be a bit too extreme a change)? You
can have kind of a preview of the effects if you start your
application with the "-bw 2" option, which changes the default
from 3 to 2.
The same question also arises for the use of bold, italic fonts
in popups and menus. Again I find them rather ugly and would
propose to use normal, non-italic fonts as the default...
Best regards, Jens
--
\ Jens Thoms Toerring ________ jt at toerring.de
\_______________________________ http://toerring.de
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