[Oberon] Blackbox open source available

[Douglas G. Danforth]

John,
I was simply looking for a way to extend the availability of BlackBox. 
I think your suggestions are far more viable and realistic.  I 
appreciate your comments.
Thanks,
-Doug


John Drake wrote:

> --- "Douglas G. Danforth" <danforth at greenwoodfarm.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Folks,
>>
>>I like the Blackbox/Component Pascal interface.  The
>>source code has now 
>>been released.  I'd be interested in hearing
>>comments about porting that 
>>code to the Native Oberon environment.  That is,
>>call those functions of 
>>native that replace MS Windows calls and still
>>retain the look and feel 
>>of Blackbox while running on Native and hence extend
>>the platforms on 
>>which Blackbox will run.
>>
>>-Doug Danforth
> 
> 
> Hello Doug,
> 
> First off I'm glad that OMI has gone to a sensible
> liscencing agreement!  It's difficult to make
> money off of development tools, especially for
> non "mainstream" languages.  Commercial versions
> of Eiffel and Modula-3 haven't faired any better.
> 
> As for your proposal, here's a quick "cost/benifit"
> analysis.  On the cost side you'll have to port
> the Component Pascal compiler right?  It's
> different from Oberon 2 (although closer to
> Oberon 2 than the Native/Active Oberon compiler).
> So there may be more work involved than just 
> replacing the Windows OS calls.
> 
> On the benifit side, how much is gained by
> extending BlackBox to the Native Oberon 
> platform?  IOW, how many Native and BlueBottle
> Oberon users are there?  I suppose one could
> have the benifit of being able to use such
> a set up to use Native Oberon as a platform
> for developing Windows apps.  But then I
> like the BlackBox development tools better
> anyway.  (Big hint to anyone in a position
> to do something about this.  It's about time
> that the System 3 family get's a decent
> post mordem debugger like BlackBox and V4).
> 
> On the flipside, BlackBox still doesn't run 
> on Linux.  (And considering the "free 
> downloads" currently available are only for 
> Windows, the Mac version of BlackBox probably 
> needs updating too.)  I would think getting
> a Linux/Unix version of BlackBox working
> would do far more to extend BlackBox to
> other platforms.  And also there's the 
> open source Garden's Point Component 
> Pascal compiler to consider with its .NET
> and JVM support.  Being able to develop an 
> app once and then deploy it to Win32, .NET
> and JVM platforms?  Sweet!  The release of
> the BlackBox code is being talked about on
> the GPCP group, so I suspect there's already
> a pool of programmers willing to work on this.
> 
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GPCP/
> http://www.citi.qut.edu.au/members/research_areas/plas/projects/cp_files/cpdownload.jsp
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake
> 
> 
> 		
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