Re: Subwindow terminology

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Sun Nov 06 2011, martin rudalics <rudalics-AT-gmx.at> wrote:

>> So sometimes a child window is not necessarily a descendant window?  If
>> so, that's just horrible.
>
> Some child windows have been adopted by their parents, others not.
> What's so horrible about that?  
> Alternatively, we would have to demand that a fresh frame always has a
> parent window with one child window which doesn't strike me as very
> useful.

It's a broken metaphor if a child of X is not also a descendant of X,
and terribly counter-intuitive.  I don't have any idea what it means for
a child window to be adopted, and I don't think it matters.

>> If you don't want to change the "subwindow" terminology, maybe "child
>> window" should become "immediate subwindow" or "direct subwindow."
>
> I already regret that I started to describe the window tree at all.  Do
> you think that I did not consider alternative ways of doing that?

I wasn't aiming my suggestion at you in particular.  I don't think
anything, the particular alternative I suggested might not have been
considered.

> Window trees are described in terms of four well known concepts - root
> window, parent window, child window and subwindow.  All these relations
> have been in the Emacs sources for years (think of `frame-root-window',
> the parent and vchild/hchild fields in the window structure, or the
> routine delete_all_subwindows) and I don't have much interest changing
> anything here.  I didn't use the terms "ancestor" and "descendant"
> because these would introduce a genealogical connotation that doesn't
> exist.

I'm sorry, but you did.  You said "often a parent window is
genealogically a descendant..."  Of course, you were explaining why the
term descendant was misleading, but I wouldn't have posted at all if it
weren't for the fact that you used these terms together.


-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com