[Oberon] Standalone BlackBox programs was: GUI programming inOberon.

[John R. Strohm]

I think it was Tony Hoare who told the story, in his Turing award lecture, of how he once proposed a default type convention to the ALGOL committee, similar to the FORTRAN default conventions, as an alternative to mandatory variable declaration.  The committee very politely boxed his ears.

He later realized that mandatory variable declaration was in fact a Very Good Idea, saying something along the lines of “Supposed the Good Fairy offered to wave her wand over your code, and eliminate all bugs, and the only price was that you had to key your code in three times.  Would you consider this a reasonable price?”

He mentioned that this was before the possibly-apocryphal story of NASA’s lost Venus probe, because of FORTRAN’s lack of mandatory variable declarations.  (Supposedly, the story goes, someone coded a DO-loop, and someone else managed to put a period where the original had a comma.  The result was syntactically legal, but not correct.)

From: Aubrey.McIntosh at Alumni.UTexas.Net 
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 11:40 AM
To: ETH Oberon and related systems 
Subject: Re: [Oberon] Standalone BlackBox programs was: GUI programming inOberon.

A strong theme in the Oberon community is documentation in the sense of understanding or having an audit trail.  A command that lists the modules in the order that they are packed is very clearly documented, and valuable for troubleshooting. 

This is the same thought pattern that believes that variables should be declared, rather than simply having the compiler allocate space, even when spelling errors creep in, or believes that identifiers should have the module name as a part of the identifier.  Yes, it takes more crafting to author the code.  That time is recovered during maintenance.




On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 4:42 AM, Lars <noreply at z505.com> wrote:

  On Mon, February 29, 2016 5:02 am, Treutwein Bernhard wrote:
  > Lars,
  >
  >
  >>>> There is no way to ship a standalone exe GUI program,
  >>>>
  >
  > Wrong. Please check before you set such a statement in the wild.
  >

  Right. Virtually you can do it, but virtually it's 100 times harder than
  using delphi...

  >
  >> How did you ship an exe standalone? modify the blackbox source code, or
  >>  use a different compiler?
  >
  > There are several way, the basic one is documented in the
  > "Platform-Specific Issues".
  >


  Yeah like I have time for this:

  "If you want to distribute an application you have written in BlackBox,
  you may want to link all modules into a single file for distribution. In
  this case you need to link the framework to your application. To
  illustrate the necessary actions we will give an example. First duplicate
  the BlackBox application in the Explorer"

  In delphi you hit F9, and you're done. In blackbox, they make it a pain in
  the butt.

  Reasons Delphi sold well? not sure. Turbo pascal? not sure...

  Okay so you can virtually do it, but literally delphi is much easier.

  --
  Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
  https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon





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Aubrey McIntosh, Ph.D.
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