Re: [TCLCORE] CFV on small high-prio TIPs (#306)

[Michael K. <mi...@mu...>]

On the auto-naming of widgets, I've long felt that it's a bit silly we 
have to name them ourselves at all.  I don't care what the widget names 
are, only that I know what they are so I can interact with them.  If I'm 
caring what the actual name is, it probably means I've hardcoded it in 
several places, which is going to make it a hassle to modify the code 
later to restructure/extend the GUI.

I'd prefer to let the parent in the hierarchy do the naming.  Perhaps this 
would largely be a matter just of convention, or perhaps there would be a 
wrapper around Tcl_CreateObjCommand to create widget commands that handle 
this automatically, but I would suggest:

1. A widget creation command (e.g. "frame"), when given no arguments or 
the first argument doesn't start with ".", gets a fully automatic name 
assignment that's a child of "." (or a child of nothing if a toplevel).

e.g.,

set top [toplevel]    ;# -> .toplevel1
set frame [frame]     ;# -> .frame1
set frame [frame]     ;# -> .frame2
set frame [frame .f]  ;# -> .f

2. The parent should be capable of creating widgets and assigning names to 
them in its hierarchy itself.  Maybe this would be done with a subcommand 
specified to that Tcl_CreateObjCommand wrapper 
(Tk_CreateWindowObjCommand?), or maybe something like "." as a subcommand 
is suitably unique and (pardon the pun) on point:

set top [toplevel]           ;# -> .toplevel1
set frame [$top . frame]     ;# -> .toplevel1.frame1
set button [$frame . button] ;# -> .toplevel1.frame1.button1

The wrapper would see that "." is the first argument and treat the second 
argument as a widget creation command (no matter what it is), inserting a 
unique name as its first argument (or, I guess, treat the first two as 
ensembles).

3. Maybe, for cases where you actually do care what the name is, extend 
(1) and (2) a little bit such that if the first argument doesn't start 
with "-" and doesn't contain any dots, then it's a parent-relative name:

set bob [frame bob]         ;# -> .bob
set top [toplevel]          ;# -> .toplevel1
set bob [$top . frame bob]  ;# -> .toplevel1.bob
set ok [$bob . button ok]   ;# -> .toplevel1.bob.ok

--
Michael Kirkham
President & CEO
Muonics, Inc.
http://www.muonics.com/