[Oberon] Oberon Day 2011 Recordings

[Jack Johnson]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:23 PM, Paul Reed <paulreed at paddedcell.com> wrote:
> Video recordings of the talks and panel discussion at last month's Oberon
> Day 2011 in Zurich are now available.

Hi Paul,

I have a few questions about your part of the keynote.

Did you do your UTF-8 integration from scratch or did you look at
other code for inspiration? Did it require extensive modification, or
mainly just to Texts? What is your end goal for UTF-8 integration, and
how do you see that ultimately affecting the simplicity of the system?

I noticed you didn't incorporate your TextFrames menu bar modification
for narrower displays. [Insert graceful segue here.] I've always
thought Oberon would be ideal in multilingual environments, especially
in education, due to it's textual nature, and it seems like your UTF-8
is another step that would help people write modules and interfaces in
something approaching their native language. Menu bars might look
significantly different in Chinese and not need your modification, but
it seems like there is opportunity to revisit your original idea in a
greater multilingual context and hopefully still find elegant and
comprehensible solutions to right-to-left text, etc.

Are you using or have you considered using Oberon-07? How might that
affect the rest of the original Oberon System code?

Have you had chats with Wirth or others about what they might have
done differently if they could do it all over again? I noted the
discussion of Objects in Appendix A of Project Oberon and aside from
the Gadgets implementation it alludes to the idea that if the Objects
module had existed at the outset it might have further simplified the
original system.

Did you consider resurrecting slim binaries, or does that add more
complexity than it removes?

Are the FPGA-based systems available?

Thanks,

-Jack