# 
# WINTERP Copyright 1989, 1990, 1991 Hewlett-Packard Company (by Niels Mayer).
# XLISP version 2.1, Copyright (c) 1989, by David Betz.
#
# Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its
# documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that
# the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that
# copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
# documentation, and that the name of Hewlett-Packard, David Betz and
# Niels Mayer not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution
# of the software without specific, written prior permission.  Hewlett-Packard,
# David Betz and Niels Mayer makes no representations about the suitability of
# this software and documentation for any purpose.  It is provided "as is"
# without express or implied warranty.
#

WINTERP: An object-oriented rapid prototyping, development and delivery
environment for building user-customizable applications with the OSF/Motif
UI Toolkit.

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WINTERP is a Widget INTERPreter, an application development environment
enabling rapid prototyping of graphical user-interfaces (GUI) through the
interactive programmatic manipulation of user interface objects and their
attached actions. The interpreter, based on David Betz's XLISP, provides an
interface to the X11 toolkit Intrinsics (Xtk), the OSF/Motif widget set,
primitives for collecting data from UN*X processes, and facilities for
interacting with other UN*X processes. WINTERP thus supports rapid
prototyping of GUI-based applications by allowing the user to interactively
change both the UI appearance and application functionality. These features
make WINTERP a good tool for learning and experimenting with the
capabilities of the OSF/Motif UI toolkit, allowing UI designers to more
easily play "what if" games with different interface styles.

WINTERP is also an excellent platform for delivering extensible or
customizable applications. By embedding a small, efficient language
interpreter with UI primitives within the delivered application, users and
system integrators can tailor the static and dynamic layout of the UI,
UI-to-application dialogue, and application functionality. WINTERP's use of
a real programming language for customization allows WINTERP-based
applications to be much more flexible than applications using customization
schemes provided by the X resource database or OSF/Motif's UIL (user
interface language).

An environment similar to WINTERP's already exists in the Gnu-Emacs text
editor -- WINTERP was strongly influenced by Gnu-Emacs' successful design.
In Gnu-Emacs, a mini-Lisp interpreter is used to extend the editor to
provide text-browser style interfaces to a number of UN*X applications
(e.g. e-mail user agents, directory browsers, debuggers, etc). Whereas
Emacs-Lisp enables the creation of new applications by tying together
C-implemented primitives operating on text-buffer UI objects, WINTERP-Lisp
ties together operations on graphical UI objects implemented by the Motif
widgets. Both achieve a high degree of customizability that is common for
systems implemented in Lisp, while still attaining the speed of execution
and (relatively) small size associated with C-implemented applications.

Other features:
	* WINTERP is free software -- available via anonymous ftp from
	  export.lcs.mit.edu.
	* Portable -- runs without porting on many Unix systems.	
	* Interface to gnuemacs' lisp-mode allows code to be developed
	  and tested without leaving the editor;
	* Built-in RPC mechanism for inter-application communications;
	* XLISP provides a simple Smalltalk-like object system.
	* OSF/Motif widgets are real XLISP objects -- widgets can be
	  specialized via subclassing, methods added or altered, etc.
	* Automatic storage management of Motif/Xt/X data.
	* Contains facilities for "direct manipulation" of UI components;