Wow: thanks for the wonderfully rapid response. Yes, the latest ltk made the issue I was having obsolete, now that tile is merged!
The weekend came, so I had a small window of time to try and put all the pieces of this ltk stuff together and make a small window that did something. In this case the widget computes the area of a circle, when given the diameter--rather elementary, but a start. Everytime I had a question, I ended up finding answers in the archives of this mailing list! Since it was my first try at making a gui that did something other than say "hello," and since I am new to lisp and new to programming in general, I am pasting this trivial excercise in hopes that you (or any advanced ltk-user) could offer criticism as to best practices, etc:
;;;;; area.lisp endeavors to create a widget that calculates the area of a circle when given a diamter
;; load dependent systems
(load "/usr/local/lisp/systems/ltk/ltk")
(in-package :ltk)
;; define function
(defun circularea ()
(with-ltk (:debug-tcl nil)
(wm-title *tk* "circularea")
(let* (
(label-d (make-instance 'label
:text "A circle with a diameter of "))
(entry-d (make-instance 'entry
:text "0"))
(label-u (make-instance 'label
:text "units"))
(label-a (make-instance 'label
:text "has an area of "))
(label-r (make-instance 'label
:text "0"))
(label-su (make-instance 'label
:text "square units"))
(b (make-instance 'button
:text "calculate"
:command
(lambda ()
(progn
(setf diameter (read-from-string (text entry-d)))
(setf radius (/ diameter 2))
(setf pi 3.145927)
(setf area (* pi (* radius radius)))
(setf (text label-r) area)
))))
)
(pack label-d)
(pack entry-d)
(pack label-u)
(pack label-a)
(pack label-r)
(pack label-su)
(pack b)
)))
;; use function
(circularea)
Thanks again for making gui programming possible for the rest of us.
--Everett
On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Peter Herth
<herth@peter-herth.de> wrote:
Hi Everett,
as it is late over here, only a very brief answer: in the meantime,
ltk-tile has been merged into
the main ltk library, if you grab the latest ltk version from:
http://ltk.rplay.net/svn/branches/ltk/repl/ltk.lisp
you get a ltk which uses the tile widget set by default (assuming you
are running tcltk 8.5 or above).
The ltktest program contained within ltk.lisp also contains some demo
code to switch between
the different tile styles on your system - just try running (ltk:ltktest).
If you have any more questions, I will gladly answer them tomorrow :)
Peter