Re: gEDA-user: Soft and Hard symbols

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 20, 2011, at 5:10 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:

> 
>> gEDA is a toolkit (toolbox), with your logic gnu unix is a tool.
> 
> gEDA is more like a design suite, a collection of tools and related
> stuff.
> 
>> Not the computer science meaning of toolkit like GTK.
> 
> We're doing computer science, we have to use the CS meanings of
> things.  A toolkit in CS is primarily a library.

Did you ever read "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger? Absolutely brilliant book on software engineering, dated only in the fact that they were using FORTRAN as their foundation. Their "tools" were separate utility programs. That's the sense I mean.

>  gEDA is more than
> just a library.  Would you call OpenOffice a toolkit?  It has a
> library.  What about Firefox?  It has a library.  gEDA?  It has a
> library.

gEDA fundamentally has a file format. You don't have to use the library, and many of the simpler gEDA tools, e.g. djboxsym, don't use the library.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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