(17-08-2020, 10:03 PM)freem Wrote:

(17-08-2020, 03:16 PM)ckester Wrote: I
What I have in mind is creating a small declarative language for user interfaces, with special attention to ncurses- or other textmode programs.

I'd be interesting to hear more on that. Ideally, IRC would be great, but we can share pieces of min on forums, too

I'll keep you in mind if I ever get beyond the info-gathering stage.

My main interest at this point is in data structures that can be used to generate an immediate-mode UI after being updated by pure functions in response to input events. As indicated above, this interest is mostly the result of a postmortem analysis of what I see as the flaws remaining in the current iteration of ncplay, which has become one of my main playgrounds for exploring ways to structure programs.

(I'm sticking with textmode programs partly because they avoid many of the complexities of GUI apps, but mainly because they appeal to my old fart sense of aesthetics. Dittos for C. But there are some ideas from the GUI or web programming world and other programming language communities that I think might be interesting to bring over into the text-based C programming world.)

Some more links re declarative UIs:

https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flu...eclarative

https://www.wearemobilefirst.com/blog/sw...rogramming

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/grapefruit-ui

Note that most discussions of declarative UIs are in the context of a framework, where once the application developer has declared the UI the framework takes care of implementing and updating it. I.e., the interest is in it mostly as a labor-saving device. My interest in different: I see it as a way to structure programs in a more functional style and I'm interested to see if this results in cleaner, more maintainable code. I'm pursuing elegance --- not labor-avoidance (which I suspect really means more bloat under the hood or behind the scenes.)