[Oberon] Re: Major feature undocumented & dir-info

[cglur at onwe.co.za]

Peter Easthope wrote:
> cg> Peviously my comments about the "menu frame collapsed into
> a dropdown menu for SystemFrame usage", got no response.
> ..
> cg> Let me now be more direct:
> HELLO!!  Is anybody aware of this facility ?
> 
> No.  How do I see this phenomenon?  Is it in TUI
> or in GUI?

GUI { Desktops.OpenDoc }.   For n-o alpha 2001 try:
1. mark SystemTrack   {F1}
2. Desktops.OpenDoc SysTrk ~

Now lets move on the the consequential question(s).
Is it good that we have such 'unknown'  features ?
And if not, how do we prevent this ?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> The output of "System.Directory  ...\d" can be filtered
> with RX.  This is good way to find files with a specific 
> date or range of dates.  

This would be a good solution.  Charle's 1st format sequence:
date, ID, size is best IMO, but messing with inner modules is a nono !
If someone can put it in a wrapper, that's good.
But what happened to the earlier version panel that I mentioned ?
We need some discipline in this factory !!

I await a final working solution.

> Since RX was extended (Patrik R., Andre F. ?) to 
> allow operation in TUI it is very useful.  While on 
> the subject, let me ask this again.
> 
> Can anyone explain why the search has a scope 
> of one line of a text file rather than the whole 
> text?  This restriction prevents RX from making 
> changes extending beyond one line.  For 
> example, I believe it can not join every successive
> pair of lines into a single line.  As far as I am 
> aware this is not an issue of the theory of regular 
> expressions.  It must be necessitated by an 
> algorithm.  Probably I should study the source 
> again but a little help would be fine. 
> 
Yes this is a serious limitation.
I recently re-investigated it's use for a possible rough converter
for WordPerfect files (my similar attempts for Postscript conversion
was usefull - for me); and reading past line terminators is needed.

What really annoyed me was the new Configuration.DoText which
no longer read scripts with lines starting with space(s).  So all my
empirically derived translations embedded in script(s) were dead.

> Also, RX.ReplaceAll fails to work for me.  Can 
> anyone test?  Is it a bug?

re. alpha 2001, yes I re-tested it again recently (after long time no
use) and found problems. 

Now, using TUI { Edit.Open } and marked {F1}.
RX.SetSearch "(" (~"\") X0
RX.SetReplace X0
RX.ReplaceAll *
  seems to work.

-- Chris Glur