The Tunes Interfaces Subproject

Automatic Interface Generation


In Fare's words, we must build, for text, graphical, audio, ... UIs,
some automatic (but programmable) interface generators for structures (that is, if I define a structure, automatically generate the behavior of the structured editor for it). Let's take basic constructors lists, vectors, meta-constructors
First, in order to get some feel for what sort of machine intelligence will be necesary for this task, it would be helpful to consider what sort of structures one might want to get automatically-generated behavior for. Probably anything you could put a sort of type on would be a valid candidate. And this would then lead to question the sort of type system Tunes will have.... Perhaps, if this type system will be "cool" enough, then an object's type alone will be enough information to figure out how to intelligently display it to the user. The exact definition of type and object, and if this will be feasible, is yet to be seen.

Once this is done, we must first develop, for each UI "mode" that we wish to support, some basic UI elements that can be relied on at higher levels. Such elements include, as Fare points out, lists and vectors, but also probably some more basic things, such as those pertaining to text and graphics. (In fact, such basic things are very necesary. One can't wish to edit a list of nothing-in-particulars!)

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Last Update: December 19, 1995