[Oberon] Essential facility missing.

[eas lab]

I often ask myself: "what am I doing wrong?
How do others manage?"

If you've got a directory containing 222 files, that you were
working with yesterday: why would you want the dir-listing
to be sorted alphabetically, instead of <stack-like> by recency?

When you put sugar in your coffee, it entails 3 items:
 sugar-bowl, teaspoon, coffee-cup.
Are illiterates who can't sort the 3 items alphabetically,
unable to do the task?  Even an insect that takes food down
its hole, uses the stack-based method:
* bring the food to near the hole and leave it,
     to free up fighting ability;
* go to the hole to check that it's not occupied;
* go back to fetch the food;
* enter the hole with the food.

If people are working with 4-files, surely they don't identify
the files by their alphabetic ordering?! They associate some
aspect of the characters-in-the-name with a concept.
For me: color is the most direct association mechanism.

ML takes <the redundancy of names> to its logical conclusion:
each expression is just known as "it".
So with 'piping systems', as the data is transformed "it" doesn't
need names at each stage.
The (n-1)th "it" goes-in and the (n)th "it" comes out.

Re. the economy of effort via piping:
 if ETHO hadn't stuck with their absurd date format, you could do:
SYS:*\d == SYS:A.text.gadget  29.07.2002  02:07:39     285
|RotateLeft(1,WhiteCharSeparatedTokens)
  ==29.07.2002  02:07:39     285  SYS:A.text.gadget
|Sort  == Dir Listing in recency order.

How is it possible that ETHO can't do the essential <recency listing> ?

System.Directory SYS:*\d ==
SYS:A.text.gadget  29.07.2002 02:07:39     285
SYS:ABC.bmp  06.05.2004 04:37:39  977462
System.Directory SYS:*\ft
 29.07.2002 02:07:39  SYS:A.text.gadget
 06.05.2004 04:37:39  SYS:ABC.bmp
System.Directory SYS:*\t
 29.07.2002 02:07:39  SYS:A.text.gadget
 06.05.2004 04:37:39  SYS:ABC.bmp
System.Directory SYS:*\f
SYS:A.text.gadget
SYS:ABC.bmp
System.Directory SYS:*\df
 29.07.2002 02:07:39     285  SYS:A.text.gadget
 06.05.2004 04:37:39  977462  SYS:ABC.bmp

== Chris Glur.