From: Dave <dlc-usenet@...>
Date: 2002-01-18T04:57:20+09:00
Subject: Newbie question: RubyTk and Observer ?


Greetings,

Unix Sysadmin here, trying to become a decent programmer as well.  In
the last three months or so, after wondering how the heck to make good
use of the Perl classes/objects Damian Conway's book taught me to
code,  I've been devouring OO analysis/design books by Booch,
Jacobson, the Three Amigos and the Gang of Four.  While I'm making use
of OO Perl in my current project at work, I've decided that I want to
learn Ruby.  [ Dave and Andy: I bought the hardcopy;  Too hard to read
a 21-inch CRT version in bed :o)  ]

So what I'm doing as a first project is that old first-quarter CS
staple, Conway's Life.  It should be an interesting exercise in
refactoring, as the first versions will be a naive, slow
implementation with the universe being a 2D array of distinct Cell
objects; then as I learn more I'll move to a Flyweight pattern for the
cells and then a bitmapped universe, etc. etc.

What I'm wondering about is how I'm going to display the results.  I
was thinking of RubyTk, since I've dabbled a little in Tcl/Tk, but
what I can't figure out is how I can make a Tk window an Observer of
my universe.  Tk's event-loop model is making me scratch my head.
Once I drop into Tk.mainloop, how the heck am I going to get any Life
processing done?  There's got to be a simpler way, but the only thing
I can (naively?) think of right now is have the GUI running in one
thread and the CA stuff running in another, and have a timer event set
in the Tk.mainloop polling the Life universe to see if it's finished a
generation and is ready to display.   There's got to be something less
"fraught with peril".  How should I approach this?

Thanks!