spacewarp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

The recent discussion regarding Tk reminded me that I have been unable to get the dang GUI working on my system. I'm using ActivePerl 5.6.0 on Win98, and everytime I try to run a program, including the "Hello World" program on page 11 of "Learning Perl/Tk", the program minimizes the command prompt and does nothing else. No errors, no output, nothing.

For easy reference, here's the code:
use Tk;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->title( "Hello World" );
$mw->Button(-text => "Done", -command => sub { exit })->pack;
Mainloop;

[download]


Any ideas on what's wrong?

Spacewarp

DISCLAIMER:
Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement
of Western industrial civilization.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Tk on Win32
by Chmrr (Vicar) on Apr 13, 2001 at 06:40 UTC

    Watch the case sensitivity. The following works fine:

    use Tk;
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->title( "Hello World" );
$mw->Button(-text => "Done", -command => sub { Tk::exit })->pack;
MainLoop;

    [download]

    Two things to notice -- use Tk::exit to drop out, as it gives Tk time to clean up, etc. Secondly, and most importantly, tis MainLoop, not Mainloop!

    Hope this helps. If not, then you might want to try reinstalling Tk. Also, try running widget.bat, which is included in the Tk install -- you should find it in the same directory that your Perl executable is in. If that doesn't work, it's a sure bet that your install is broken.

     
    perl -e 'print "I love $^X$\"$]!$/"#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you very much! That was indeed the problem. Time to start playing!!! 8)

      Incidentally, I *love* your sig! 8)

      Spacewarp

      DISCLAIMER:
      Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement
      of Western industrial civilization.
[reply]
Re: Tk on Win32
by atcroft (Abbot) on Apr 13, 2001 at 06:51 UTC
    I tried running it on ActiveState build 618, and got the same results as you-nothing. So I decided to try it from the command line with -w for warnings, and got:

    C:\WINDOWS\Desktop> perl -w tk1.pl
    Useless use of a constant in void context at tk1.pl line 5.
    Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at C:/Perl/site/lib/Tk.pm line 350.
    Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at C:/Perl/site/lib/Tk.pm line 350.

    Line 5 was the line you have as "Mainloop;" -when I changed this to "MainLoop();", it worked for me. Trying "-w" gave only:

    C:\WINDOWS\Desktop> perl -w tk1.pl
    Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at C:/Perl/site/lib/Tk.pm line 350.
    Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at C:/Perl/site/lib/Tk.pm line 350.

    I did get the button you intended, then.
[reply]

      A side note -- those warnings of undefined values are Tk looking for a HOME environment variable. Either go in and tweak the source on those lines to make it happy, or set the HOME variable yourself.

       
      perl -e 'print "I love $^X$\"$]!$/"#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

[reply]
        Here's my win95/winME "tweak" (i copy/pasted the whole subroutine that i munged). PS if you don't have multiple logins under win95/ME just change the else{$Home=... to $Home="C:/My Documents", on NT/2000 i'm not to sure...havn't messed with pTK on my NT box yet.

        sub TranslateFileName
{
 local $_ = shift;
 unless (defined $Home)
  {
   unless ($^O eq 'MSWin32'){
       $Home = $ENV{'HOME'} || ($ENV{'HOMEDRIVE'}.$ENV{'HOMEPATH'});
   } else {
          $Home = "c:/windows/profiles/" . getlogin() . "/My Documents
+";
   }  
   $Home =~ s#\\#/#g;
   $Home .= '/' unless $Home =~ m#/$#;
  }
 s#~/#$Home#g;
 # warn $_;
 return $_;
}

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