[Oberon] On Oberon Sources

[Bob Walkden]

On 3 Apr 2016, at 22:17, Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias at web.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Am 03.04.2016 um 22:24 schrieb Bob Walkden:
>>> On 3 Apr 2016, at 21:02, Srinivas Nayak <sinu.nayak2001 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear Bob,
>>> 
>>> I see that there are some converters.
>>> But how come Oberon isn't able to create a plain ascii file directly?
>> 
>> Because it uses its natively-formatted texts. And what do you mean by 'directly'?
>> 
>> There is no need in Oberon to create 'directly' any text format other than its native one. What would be the purpose?
>> 
>> What would it do with plain text, or any other non-native text that someone else thinks it should have? UTF-8? -16? EBCDIC? PDF?
>> 
>> What additional software would be required to do those things?
>> 
>> Why would you need to do those things if your user interface is based on a different model of text?
>> 
>> The only value it has in Oberon is for exchanging data with other systems, and for that converters are adequate.
> 
> Your questions are right if you see Oberon as a closed system. However, if you run it e.g. on top of Linux, why should you prevent someone using Oberon as his favourite text editor or programming environment for other lanuages?

You shouldn't - that's exchanging data with other systems. 

A hypothetical command such as ebcdic.edit c:/mydata.txt reads a text file, converting it to an Oberon text. When you execute ebcdic.save it stores the Oberon text back in c:/mydata.txt, converting it on the way. 

This is no different from Word reading and storing a rtf file, or Excel ditto a csv file.

B