[Oberon] On Oberon Sources

[Bob Walkden]

Hi,

Well, pretty much the entire book. The user interface is based on the notion of working with documents, which in Oberon terms are heterogeneous, extensible texts. 

One of the principle objectives of the project was to develop an OS that could be understood by individuals in its entirety. Having texts as they are constituted plus plain text as a separate thing would have certainly violated Occam's law and led to a large amount of duplication and unnecessary complexity; using plain text only would probably also have led to some sort of unmanageable bloat-monster. 

Although it would have been possible, perhaps, to do it all with plain ascii, you'd have ended up with something like xml and its derivatives, and I don't believe that would have in the spirit of Oberon.

Realistically of course, plain text is required for interfacing with other OSes, but you don't really need the ability to do anything with it other than import to and export from an Oberon text.

Oberon was not intended to be Windows or Unix or anything of the other bloated 'real-world' OSes, it was intended to show how one could approach a fresh start.

Parnas wrote an interesting criticism of Oberon, called Why Software Jewels Are Rare, but I think it misses the point of Oberon

B

> On 31 Mar 2016, at 20:04, Srinivas Nayak <sinu.nayak2001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Bob,
> 
> I went through the book some weeks ago.
> Would you kindly point me to some chapter or section number for my re-read?
> 
> 
> With thanks and best regards,
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> Srinivas Nayak
> 
> Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
> Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
> 
>> On 03/31/2016 10:13 PM, Bob Walkden wrote:
>> Have you read Reiser's book about the Oberon System? It is explained in there.
>> 
>> B
>> 
>>> On 31 Mar 2016, at 17:37, Srinivas Nayak <sinu.nayak2001 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Many thanks Dieter for your quick reply...
>>> 
>>> 
>>> True that converting files to ascii files is simple.
>>> But when we say, Oberon is simple, we should have used plain ascii files as a minimum.
>>> In a minimal system we generally need a couple of .Obj files, a couple of .Mod files,
>>> a couple of .Tool files and .Text files.
>>> I feel, except .Obj files rest all could have been plain ascii files.
>>> I want to understand why "that is not the case" in Oberon, where as to my knowledge, "that is the case" in
>>> so called complex Linux!
>>> Any issue with plain ascii files in Oberon? Performance wise? Processing/parsing wise? Storage/retrieval wise?
>>> 
>>> I think, in Linux we see a couple of executable files (corresponding to .Obj files) (not plain ascii)
>>> a couple of .C and .H files (corresponding to .Mod files) (plain ascii)
>>> a couple of .sh files (corresponding to .Tool files) (plain ascii)
>>> a couple of .txt (corresponding to .Text files) (plain ascii).
>>> 
>>> Obviously, Oberon is much richer.
>>> So we can have well formatted text files.
>>> That feature we can have, just to show the richness of Oberon.
>>> But not as a minimum requirement.
>>> 
>>> Still I think, plain ascii text files are "simple" than formatted text files.
>>> Or, just not to make things "simpler" we used formatted text files everywhere (.Mod .Tool .Text .Def)?
>>> 
>>> Confused.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> With thanks and best regards,
>>> 
>>> Yours sincerely,
>>> Srinivas Nayak
>>> 
>>> Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
>>> Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
>>> 
>>>> On 03/31/2016 09:31 PM, Dieter wrote:
>>>> Hi Srinivas,
>>>> 
>>>> I have been using ETH-Oberon for many  years on Windows.
>>>> 
>>>> Any decent editor like "notepad++" can deal with the apple-like "0AX" end-of-line-character.
>>>> 
>>>> When you are irritated by the binary stuff at the beginning , just remove it and save the rest as txt-file.
>>>> 
>>>> To my understanding the binary stuff serves only for formatting the text of the module.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Dieter
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> Am 31.03.2016 um 17:40 schrieb Srinivas Nayak:
>>>>> The biggest confusion right now I have is,
>>>>> why Oberon didn't use simple ascii text files?
>>>>> 
>>>>> None of Oberon files are open-able as plain ascii file!
>>>>> Which extension in file name says that the file is a plain ascii file?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> With thanks and best regards,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yours sincerely,
>>>>> Srinivas Nayak
>>>>> 
>>>>> Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
>>>>> Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
>>>>> --
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