Plwm – An X11 window manager written in Prolog

Many people, when they say math, mean continuous math.

At work, my colleagues are almost entirely statisticians and actuaries, and I sometimes joke that my only math course at university was Calculus 1. I have of course done lots more math, but it’s all CS type stuff like logic and discrete structures like graphs and trees which is a very different world from continuous stuff.

Great news! I'd seen river before (already had it bookmarked) but was unaware (or forgot) that it planned a feature like this. As long as they don't make it to tiling specific, which doesn't look likely given the wording of the Features section, it should be almost exactly what I want. Thanks!

A protocol defines a set of primitives and their interactions, along with prescriptions where necessary, but is otherwise pretty loose generally. Especially in a Postels law world. APIs tend to be highly prescriptive with a highly specific interface and a lot of black box.

Think of the difference between an IETF RFC on say SMTP vs an email API - the RFC describes how clients and servers for mail routing interact through an almost dialog, while a typical email API has highly structured interfaces. Another wat to cut it is an API can be tested as it has inputs and return values dependent on those, while a protocol you can generally only assert compliance with the specification of the protocol.

People often assert protocols have something to so with RPC of some sort but that’s not true. Many language support protocols, which can be very similar to interfaces, but don’t have anything to do with OOP, etc. In language protocols it’s slightly different than network/IPC protocols but the intent is similar.

I'm not the most knowledgeable, but a protocol talks to another process through a specific format.

I personally think its more powerful than writing a new process to replace and existing.

My favorite example is an X11 windows manager implementing in about 18 lines of python.

Obviously there's dependencies to talk to the X server, but the power of a protocol comes from any program written in any la gage communicate with existing code.

They're both poorly defined, but what I think GP meant is they want something that you use something like a socket instead of FFI to interface with. You need an extra data description layer for a 'protocol' in this context because you can't rely on something like the C data model and calling convention as a given.

A couple ways to look at it:

- Protocols are descriptive, APIs are prescriptive

- Protocols are implemented, APIs implement

A protocol is like the line at Subway where an api is a bar & restaurant.

for x11, there was one written in scheme and used a proper constraint-solver for layout etc.