[Oberon] Trivialising formality considered harmful

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Chris,
I support your 'request' for stronger case consistency.
-Doug Danforth

easlab at absamail.co.za wrote:
> A recent observation/complaint that the suggested identifyer formats
> was ignored, was mostly trivialised. 
>
> Some ideas on the RFCs system idea:
> Only by making and obeying agreed rules/standards can 
> geopgraphically  dispersed collaborators make combined progress.
> ETH oberon seems already to have passed the stage when the loss by
> entropy exceeds the new value added - the added contributions are
> matched by the 'evaporation' losses of the contents-bowl.
>
> The only way to advance is to delegate the initial decisions [eg. the
> syntax of identifiers- uppercase..start-char ...etc.] to agreed rules,
> to free-up mental creativety for REAL decisions.    Idealy these
> initial [now trivial] decisions would be captured and frozen, the way
> the language is frozen in the compiler. No possiblilty to mess with it
> in the name of artistic licence !
>
> The progress from: 
> -  codeing in binary with switches,
> -  codeing in hex with papertape,
> -  codeing in assembler,
> ...
> -  codeing in a strongly typed language[s]
> should not end there.
>
> The decision [artistic licence which creates chaos] of ID formats
> should be removed, and frozen into the language system.
>
> One step towards this is to first have a well considered 
> recommendation - which apparently is already the case ?
>
> And to have this followed/tested for a [certain] time/volume.
> Of course this strong-typing/restricted-format is consistent with
> the Wirthian minimalist approach.
>
> I've noted [perhaps wrongly] that for N-O fileIDs, the format
> 'Name.Extension' is inappropriate - probably being a [now 
> inapplicable] copy from some previous OS.
> 'NameExtension' seems better, especially since it avoids confusion 
> with syntax which MUST use the "." [period] and can avoid 
> unintentional 'Module.Command' execution.
>
> IMO the increase in reduntant text formats is a curse:
>  html, Word, *.ps, *.pdf ...etc. where plain text is adequate;
>  and 'a^8099', 'ç', ' &ldquo' ...etc. for single/double quotes.
>
>
>
> == Chris Glur.
>
>
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