[Oberon] Project Oberon: What are nexts steps?

eas lab lab.eas at gmail.com
Sat May 10 21:09:50 CEST 2014


Wrong QUESTION ! It's not Oberon 'or' C.
Because C is just a language. The value of Oberon lies in the HCI
which can't be described in technical terms; it needs
socio/psychological considerations.
Eg. NW writes <we're not convinced by the M$ offset-stacked-paper metaphor>.
Deeper though tells why is inferior to the ETHO method:
 you loose space along 2 borders. A scarce and valuable resource is
screen-for-chars-area  [not zigaFlops].
The paper-book is a miracle; because all the pages automatically
align, so that 500 pages need only the area on ONE page.

Here's an example of how human factors matter:
wily is copied from ETHO by the plan9 [originators of unix] boys using
different mouse combinations to ETHO. A nice facility which ETHO
lacks, is that if a text frame which is covered, is 'called', it just
'pops up' instead of BADLY being reloaded.

Like ETHO: MM in a white-char-separate-token executes the token.
But to execute a string-of-tokens you can:
 MM down, move mouse through the substring, MM release [to execute eg:
 `cp File1 File2` : which has 3 tokens.
Unfortunately some time when you just want to ETHO-like MM klux
a multicharToken, klux is NOT atomic! It has 3 steps:
1. MM down,
2. hopefully not move unintentionally while down,
3. MM release to execute.

So if you selected the "T" and it moves when down then you get
"error: T unknown".
Sorry for the long story, but  REAL life is complex.

== Chris Glur.



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