A surprising discovery: If one defines a class or even a C procedure within a macro, an error message appears i.e. "Limitation: Can not define body of function in temp file, File:....". This can be bypassed by making the procedure into a separate macro such as phtog.C so it is no real restriction, but it does affect the structure and organization of a system of macros and shareable libraries.
This works OK as usual for C++ in general i.e. a carriage return is "whitespace"; but a string of statements within quotes, such as the method argument for TButton, cannot be broken by returns.
Perhaps on further reading I'd find a way around such as repeated quotes or some other defined syntax, but " quotes within " quotes lead to the obvious ambiguity.
The right mouse pulldowns rely upon one being close to a vertex such as one corner of a detector rectangle. It might be easier to pick based on being close to the middle. I don't know how hard this is to implement. It helps to select a "status bar" from the canvas menu to display at the bottom which object would be picked by a right click. A change in color for
an object within picking range, as well as already picked, would help a lot (but may be too slow... I think a repaint of the canvas is called).
The TView class automatically scales (but not always it seems?) to fill the 3-d box in x, y, z. This is very useful in lego and 3-D plots but distorts views of real apparatus. As you see I experimented (little green button) with changing to equal scale factors (with some apparently system dependent mysteries about the offset). I have not found how to "clip" i.e. all objects are made to fit within the "rotator box"; maybe we can live with this if we make more selection of subsets of objects to view (such as just one "banjo" in the multiplicity detectors).
This is a very new class and I suspect further work is underway by the ROOT team. Right now, only mouse rotations are supported; if object picking (right mouse) is not soon implemented we may be able to do it ourselves by overloading the ExecuteEvent() method after learning more about the inner workings of this class. For now, it is useful for pretty pictures.
Note in phgeom.C the repeated c1->Draw() statements that seem to be required for a view with objects in the proper locations. Why is this?
Noted with pleasure: "/" seems to be automatically changed to "\" in W95 path arguments
In W95, start executables with 'Start" in gSystem->Exec() arguments, but not in UNIX! Also one obviously wants & at the end of the line in UNIX but not W95/NT. This (and the streamer problem below) account for differing W95/NT and UNIX downloads.
The streaming to a string variable seen in phghelp.C is quite convenient in the W95 version but had to be abandoned in the UNIX version (replaced by strcpy and strcat calls). The desired string is constructed, but ROOT crashes at the phghelp.C exit when an operator destructor is called, presumably the overloaded << for writing to a string?
Not to criticise Valery Fine's valiant efforts in bringing ROOT to the W95/NT world, but there may have been a small oversight. If the first numerical argument of a TCanvas creator is negative, the menu bar at the top is omitted. This is useful for button panels and is in fact built in to the inherited class TDialogCanvas. However, it doesn't work in W95.
