[Oberon] A path variable for OLR?

[Bob Walkden]

Back in the day, I worked on ICL 29-series mainframes and a mini called the ME29. They had a control language called SCL, based on Algol 68. With it you were able to declare 'currencies', which were shorthands for path strings, and indeed files. 

So if you had two directories say on different disk packs, one production, one dev, you wrote something like select x = ed1234.folder, y = ed4321, and referred to files as *x.name, *y.folder.name, or simply *x, and so on.

You could pass the folder names as parameters and use the parameter variable as an argument to select, so select x = &foldername, and whatever was in the foldername parameter became *x.

The syntax above is certainly wrong - it was a long time ago - but the facility was extraordinarily useful and I wish other OSes had something as good.

http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-scl-848.html

In fact it was because I liked SCL so much, and remembered a brief exposure to Pascal, that when I started using PCs I looked for a similar programming language and found JPI Modula-2, and then Oberon.

There's an example of use here, 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_VME#SCL

and it shows how much I've forgotten since where I wrote select x = whatever above, it should be assignfile( whatever, x ). Oh well.

B

> On 5 Aug 2016, at 17:00, Peter Easthope <peter at easthope.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hello Peter M.,
> 
> Native Oberon recognizes multiple storage parts and a priority
> order.  Thus SYS:System.Tool and HOME:System.Tool can
> exist.  As the system is installed, SYS is the default and
> System.Tool means SYS:System.Tool.  If the default is set to
> HOME, then System.Tool means HOME:System.Tool.
> 
> I wonder whether you might consider adding such a capability
> to OLR.  A variable such as OPATH for example.  Following
> OPATH=/home/peter/usbstick ; export OPATH
> System.Tool would mean /home/peter/usbstick/System.Tool
> rather than /home/peter/olr/System.Tool.
> 
> Is there a better idea?
> 
> Thanks,                ... Lyall E.
> 
> -- 
> Telephone 1 360 639 0202 or +13606390202.
> Bcc: peter at easthope.ca  http://easthope.ca/Shop.html
> 
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