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

[Bob Walkden]

I've never understood why no one in the type-safety community has ever proposed a DON'T loop.

B

> On 23 Mar 2016, at 08:14, John R. Strohm <strohm at airmail.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.
>  
> 
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