Re: [Now that 0.17 is (almost) out]

[Ariel Rios <jarios at usa dot net>]

Miroslav Silovic <silovic@zesoi.fer.hr> wrote:


> So... I agree that gnome-python folks should be contacted, as well as
> people who wrote bindings to other languages (objc and TOM pop to
> mind). Perhaps a common mailing list would be a good start, as well.
> I think that a common language binding base is *extremely* important
> for GNOME (as language neutrality is its major feature, and because
> GNOME is the only major library suite in existance that actually gave
> any thought to true multilanguage support).

I agree. One of the most important gnome (and of course gtk) feature is the
ability of using almost any programming language. However, I think that almost
all of the bindings vary in the way they are implemented. I think a 'standard'
way of doing the bindings most be found and used. In that way we can have a
common ground on which we can share and use the work made by others.

A mailing list for what we may call gnome common language specification is
very important to start talking with the people working in other bindings
-I think on Haskell, Pascal, Jscript, Eiffel ones.

Also, it may allow us to develop an app using several different languages at a
time depending which language is more convenient to tackle specific problems.

>It would also allow us to
> share effort with other teams (thereby allowing, for instance, objc
> folks to tackle libxml, while we finish libgnome binding - both of
> which would (hopefully) be reusable from, say, Ada).
Divide and conquer. It would be better to split the task in such a way that we
do not have to do and redo the same things in every language binding.

In that way we can also have a base upon new bindings be developed. For
example, bindings for GNU Prolog may reuse all of the machinery done by the
other language bindings developers and so, the new language bindings may be
very short in size and development time having not to begin everything from
scratch.

This gnome common lang. spec. should be included as a standard gnome
component.

Ariel

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