user i/o overview

These functions facilitate interaction with the user. We will eventually need a fairly sophisticated mechanism divorcing what is presented from how to present it; For now, we provide only a few essential low-level functions.

My past experience has indicated that the ability to compose a display out of the following four basic classes of widgets is sufficient to build simple but effective interfaces:

1. Widget to allow text string entry.
2. Widget to allow control of bounded integer variable.
3. Widget to allow control of bounded float variable.
4. Widget to allow selection of one of N strings.

Additional specialized widgets, such as to allow selection of a color from a color from a saturation hue intensity colorspace, can certainly be welcome on occasion, but the above four seem to suffice in general.

Thus first four functions in this section implement these abilities in a form appropriate for use in an :interactiveFunction for a restart. (See section withRestartDo.)

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