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Date:Mon Jun 11 17:39:01 1998 
Subject:Re: MSBLOCKS demo (PS re hourglass) 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:980611.02 

Jocelyn,

I forgot to answer one of your questions:

> Using Xved, although
> the pictures look OK, the Xved window that contains
> the picture of the robot hand and blocks refuses to accept
> input - placing the cursor over it, the cursor changes to
> an hourglass.

I forgot to answer this one. That's normal behaviour. It is because
of the way the msblocks library is implemented. While it is running
it is inside the "repeat" loop in the procedure runparser. This
means that the normal XVED input mechanism cannot regain control
until the procedure has finished. Also it can accept input (via
readline) only from the XVED window in which you invoked the
program. Even in that window you can't scroll up and down using
normal VED commands, e.g. to reuse previous input with slight
editing, or to select one of the examples printed out by the "help"
command.

All this is fixed (thanks to help from John Gibson) in the version
included with RCLIB, mentioned in my previous message. If you want
to use that without the new graphics, you can try copying and
modifying the stuff I got from John Gibson for running the program
asynchronously with Ved. This will involve looking at the procedures
    runparser,
    rc_blocks_compile
    blocks_go

and the call of
    subsystem_add_new

All of which I found very obscure! (We need better support for
threads?)

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman at cs.bham.ac . uk
Phone: +44-121-414-4775 (Sec 3711)       Fax:   +44-121-414-4281