Another annoying geomview bug...

[fowler]

I think it's true that just getting a list of objects is very hard to 
deal with.  I've had trouble with this while writing external modules
since if I ask for a bare geometry I can't be sure if I'm going to get
only one object or twenty objects.  The best solution I've found is
to read in the first object and then assume that if nothing more
arrives in a reasonable amount of time, that's all there is.  Another
problem is that asking for the bare world geometry when there are no
objects present causes nothing to be printed out.  Again, the best
approach I've been able to find is the time-out one.  But then, I
think that's an exteremly bad technique since there's no (reliable)
way to figure out how fast geomview is running in comparison to the
external module.

The idea of the list without the world transform makes sense to me,
but would it still work if there was nothing in the world?  I don't
know if empty lists are considered legitimate by the libraries...

I talked with some people (I think Tamara and Mark) about a way to
inquire as to the name of the target object.  From an external-module
point of view, this would help since you would know that if you asked
for the bare geometry of the target object you would know to be
prepared for more than one object iff the name of the selected object
was "World."  If you could combine this with knowing the number of
objects in the world (something we also discussed at some point) you
would be all set from an external module point of view.  Knowing
whether or not the selected object is the world is also important if
you are attempting to write an external module that changes the
geometry of the target object (I've got several that attempt to do
this) since Mere Mortals Cannot Change The World Geom.  This would
not solve the problem of writing the bare world geometry to a file and
getting something which Geomview finds indigestable because there is
more than one geom present without a list around it.  Getting a list
of the names of the objects in the world was also mentioned at one
time and would be a very big help (eg for external modules that might
want to apply a certain action to each seperate object in the world).

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter.

-Celeste