[Oberon] Re: Oberon Digest, Vol 30, Issue 24

[Rory L. Starkweather]

 I've been looking at the Oberon options for the last few months, and
posted a couple of messages here a week or so ago. I had some difficulty
deciding on a 'flavor' of Oberon to learn. I corresponded with a few
people off list and got some good hints, but I was using Win2KPro and I
really couldn't get very far with the packages that are designed for
Windows. I looked at BlackBox, POW and Mike Spivey's Oxford version.

 Unfortunately, the Oxford version was the only one I had any real luck
with as far as getting programs written and compiled, it that is the
word for it. I have to admit that I didn't give BlackBox much of a
chance.

 Since then I've decided to complicate my life further and switch to
Linux, which I have no experience with. My goal is still to learn
Oberon, but I think that I will have to spend some time learning Linux
before I can go very far.

 What I need to do now is try to decide on an Oberon package to work
with. From reading the messages in the list there seem to be more
options than I thought.

 I would appreciate some input on what YOU would do in this situation.
Which system do YOU think has the best chance of becoming a standard. I
don't want to end up going down another evolutionary dead-end, like VB
6. I say that VB 6 is an evolutionary dead end because of the
compatibility issues with VB.Net. It appears that the VB 6 family is
going to die out. I've tried VB.Net, briefly, and it seems less
appealing than C++.

 I would like to try Native Oberon, but, as I mentioned before, I had a
lot of trouble figuring out how to do anything with it. The issue wasn't
with the number of buttons my mouse had. The concept looked great, but I
never found any explicit instructions on how to create what I would call
a program. I understand that is not what Oberon calls them. Specifically
I needed to know how to save a file that I had created. I just never
figured that out. There is a lot of documentation but it seems to me
that it makes some assumptions about familiarity with the Oberon-2
interface. I had no problem finding information on how to manipulate
widgets, but I didn't ever really understand how to add one to a form.

 Now I've seem some messages about Zonnon and Component Pascal and
Bluebottle. Bluebottle didn't appear to me to be a complete system.
Unless I misunderstood, the documentation said it didn't have a browser,
for instance. Since it appears that most of the documentation available
for some of these offerings is on the web, lack of a browser would seem
to a problem.

 I have some experience with computers and programming, but I would be
trying to use a programming language new to me with an operating system
new to me. I would appreciate your hearing your thoughts.

 Rory