[Oberon] On Oberon Sources

[Srinivas Nayak]

Dear Bob,

Now I see what you mean.
Possible that Oberon by default deals with Text with formatting,
like pdf creator/reader deal with pdfs only.
That means, for Oberon, formatted text is "simple" and
plain ascii is "simpler". And we say "make things simple but not simpler".
"Pdf" word in your message made me realize this.

I always thought, when we say "make things simple but not simpler",
we mean, make things such that simpler than that is impossible,
or in other words, deal with simplest things only.
That is why I thought Oberon must support plain ascii.

But now I see, I was wrong.
Different systems may have different criteria for their meaning/level of "simple".
It is not about dealing with absolute minimum things always.
Again "simple" is a relative word. (Einstein also taught us about relativity.)
Whatever is "simple" for one, may not be "simple" for other.
For Linux, plain ascii may be simple. For Oberon formatted text is simple.
For DOS/Linux, CLI is simple. For Windows GUI is simple. For Oberon TUI is simple.
For Adobe Acrobat, pdf format is simple. For Word, doc format is simple. For Notepad, txt format is simple.
For a CRT TV, analog signal is simple. For a CRT monitor, digital signal is simple.
Any system/OS can declare "simple but not simpler".
But, we must ask, what is simple for them - philosophically.
It should never be confused that every system should try to be simplest.
By the way, what is "simplest" now? :-D

This is a nice learning for me.



With thanks and best regards,

Yours sincerely,
Srinivas Nayak

Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/

On 04/04/2016 03:29 AM, Bob Walkden wrote:
> 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
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