Tycho FAQ

The information below is convered in the Tycho documentation, we present it here in a slightly different format.

Table of Contents

  • 1. General
  • 1.1 What Is Tycho?
  • 1.2 What features does Tycho have?
  • 1.3 How do I download Tycho?
  • 1.4 What platforms does Tycho run under?
  • 1.5 Troubleshooting
  • 1.6 What Is Itcl?
  • 1.7 What is Ptolemy?
  • 1.8 Who was Tycho Brahe?
  • 2. Why didn't you . . .
  • 2.1 Why didn't you just use emacs?
  • 2.2 Why didn't you use the Iwidgets widgets?

  • 1. General

    1.1 What Is Tycho?
    At first glance, Tycho is a extensible Itcl development environment. We are developing Tycho to use it as a GUI for the Ptolemy Project. Tycho0.1.1 is a work in progress, but others my find it useful as is.
    1.2 What features does Tycho have?

    The two primary features that Itcl developers will find interesting are the Itcl profiler and the graphical class browser. Other features include:

  • Integrated HTML-based documentation system, including automatic generation of HTML documentation from Itcl files.
  • A canvas interface with grouped objects.
  • An emacs-like syntax-sensitive text editors (with considerably more than the Tk text widget).
  • Tcl/Itcl interactive shell.
  • Widget library, including:
  • file browser
  • spell checker (Unix only)
  • font selector
  • preference system (partially constructed)
  • index browser
  • configurable dialog widgets
  • interface to RCS and SCCS version control (Unix only)
  • simple color browser
  • HTML formatted message widgets
  • error handler with stack trace display
  • graph display with auto-layout for directed acyclic graphs
  • tree structure display with collapsible subtrees
  • bubble and arc graph editor
  • interface to glimpse (Unix only)
  • Base classes and widgets for construction of other applications:
  • view/displayer architecture
  • font manager
  • menu bar
  • status bar
  • tool bar
  • subpanel
  • file system interface
  • text editor widget
  • 1.3 How do I download Tycho?
    http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/tycho/Tycho.html has instructions and Itcl binaries.
    1.4 What platforms does Tycho run under?
    We do our development work under Solaris2.5.1. Tycho has been run under WindowsNT, but some of the features that use exec are broken. The Macintosh port is substantially broken, but we are working on improving it.
    1.5 Troubleshooting
    The Tycho Troubleshooting guide has a few hints.

    If you are really stumped, you can send mail to tycho@eecs.berkeley.edu. Your mail should include:

    1. What version of Tycho you are running.
    2. What platform you are running under (Solaris, Windows etc.)
    3. Exactly how to reproduce the bug.
    1.6 What Is Itcl?
    Itcl is short hand for [incr tcl] which is an object oriented version of the Tool Command Language (tcl). Tcl was written by John Ousterhout of U.C. Berkeley and Sun Labs, Itcl was written by Michael McLennan of Lucent. For more information about Itcl, including a PostScript tutorial, see the Itcl homepage at http://www.tcltk.com.
    1.7 What is Ptolemy?
    Ptolemy is a software package that is used to design signal processing and communications systems, ranging from designing and simulating algorithms to synthesizing hardware and software, parallelizing algorithms, and prototyping real-time systems.

    Ptolemy is written in C++, and uses Tcl/Tk and the X Window System. See http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu for further information.

    Tycho0.1.1 does not include some of the Ptolemy features we have been working on, as they require changes to Ptolemy0.6

    1.8 Who was Tycho Brahe?
    Tycho Brahe was an astronomer, the Tycho documentation includes a brief biography.

    2. Why didn't you . . .

    2.1 Why didn't you just use emacs?
    FSF Emacs is not particularly graphical, though xemacs is better. We want to be able to have active graphical widgets intermingled with text.
    2.2 Why didn't you use the Iwidgets widgets everywhere?
    Tycho uses a different model for mapping widgets to the screen. In particular, widgets are completely constructed, and then actively mapped to the screen. Unlike iwidgets, which map partially constructed widgets, Tycho widgets can be centered on the screen and sized according to screen dimensions. We could not find a way to use iwidgets without sacrificing these features.

    This was a design decision made by the Tycho authors. In some cases, we decided to use a simpler widget. In other cases the functionality we needed was missing. We also wanted the widget we wrote to use some of the features of Tycho, such as automatically generated documentation and active tcl examples.

    Why didn't you use Java?
    When we started Tycho, Java was still very new. Currently, we don't know of a good canvas like Java class like the tk canvas. We'd rather not reinvent the wheel here and write our own Java canvas. We are looking into integrating Java and Tycho.

    Also, we wanted to be able to provide an easily extensible environment for non-programmers, which makes an interpreted language such as Tcl a stronger candidate than a compiled language such as Java.

    Tycho Home Page


    Copyright © 1996, The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
    Last updated: 12/17/96, comments to: tycho@eecs.berkeley.edu