button("click me") doesn't have to be a widget. Think expression templates. It can just build up a type to be used by window to add a button.
Well said. This exemplifies the reason why most gui toolkits are so horrible to use, they allow implementation technicalities to dictate interface. Having to decide where an object is going to live before any of its properties can be set is a clear violation of object oriented design principles but we live with these kind of problems all the time for supposed technical reasons.
Hear, hear! Given the huge number of half- to three-quarter-baked GUI solutions floating around, I think that anything that's proposed for boost should very carefully consider abstracting the problem in a way which allows the most (or at least one of the) sensible and intuitive syntaxes and then allow the design to drive implementation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------- Matthias Schabel, Ph.D. Utah Center for Advanced Imaging Research 729 Arapeen Drive Salt Lake City, UT 84108 801-587-9413 (work) 801-585-3592 (fax) 801-706-5760 (cell) 801-484-0811 (home) mschabel at ucair med utah edu