[Oberon] Easier typing of capital letter keywords in Oberon

[Chris Burrows]

The Oberon syntax-aware editor in our Astrobe IDE has an 'Auto-capitalisation' feature. This is the description of how it works from the Astrobe Help file:

-------------------------------------------------
The Oberon language requires that reserved words (BEGIN, WHILE etc.) and predeclared identifiers (INTEGER, TRUE etc.) consist exclusively of capital letters. When editing source files, Astrobe automatically detects these words and capitalises them, if necessary, as you are typing. The auto-capitalisation feature can turned on or off from the Tools > Preferences menu.

Astrobe capitalises a word when all of the following conditions apply:

• The RETURN key is pressed or one of the following characters is typed:
 
     space  
(    left-parenthesis   
)    right-parenthesis  
;    semi-colon
|    vertical bar
,    comma 
*    asterisk

• The word is a reserved word, predeclared identifier or a qualified SYSTEM identifier 
• The word consists entirely of lowercase letters 
• The word is not contained in a comment or string 

NOTE: If you need to use a reserved word or predeclared identifier in lowercase, then you can reverse the effect of auto-capitalisation by selecting Edit > Lower Case (Ctrl-L) when the cursor is positioned at the end of the word.  As well as converting the word to lowercase it suppresses auto-capitalisation for the next keystroke to prevent it from being immediately converted back to capitals again.
------------------------------------------------- 

The origianl versions of Astrobe that target ARM Cortex-M3/M4 systems are commercial software. However, we have released a free full-featured version of Astrobe that can be used to edit, compile and upload Project Oberon 2013 RISC5 FPGA applications for no charge. For more details see:

  http://www.astrobe.com/RISC5

Regards,

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com

 


From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Eric Scharff
Sent: Saturday, 23 January 2016 4:52 AM
To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
Subject: [Oberon] Easier typing of capital letter keywords in Oberon

So, in my tinkering with both Native Oberon and Project Oberon 2013, I have to say I really like Oberon (the language), but as a newbie, the environment is tricky.

The most obvious thing for me is that Oberon doesn't seem to recognize my caps lock key.  I know it sounds trivial, but it's leading to a huge ergonomic issue for me.

typing PROCEDURE or INTEGER (and the other keywords) while holding down the shift key is extremely uncomfortable. Typing <caps-lock>integer<caps-lock) would be an improvement (all lower case typing), but still has extra keystrokes.

Really, I'd like to type all of the capitalized keywords in lower case, and then apply a filter to my document to automatically capitalize, and run such a trigger when I Edit.Store a file.  Does such a thing exist?

Do other folks run into this problem? What are recommended solutions?