[Oberon] V4 versus S3 survey

[Skulski, Wojciech]

> So, Gadgets needs to be cleaned up.
> Since I have been involved with BlackBox development it seems
> appropriate to suggest we start a Gadgets Framework development group
> and sequentially fix all the bugs found.

Doug:

This may sound like a good idea to me. However, BlackBox has been officially transferred to public domain by its creators. The development groups formed quite a while later. ETH Oberon and Gadgets have not been officially abandoned. I am sensing that there is still a sense of ownership at ETH, even though I am not sure if they support it anymore. It may be inappropriate to start "fixing bugs". If these are bugs at all. Confusion may be rather due to gaps in understanding. 

My own mixed feelings stem from porting a graphics package from Gadgets to BlackBox. I wrote the package using the Gadgets framework. The package was flaky and confusing to me. Then I ported it to BlackBox. It shrank by half and became very solid. It taught me that BlackBox approach with type-bound messages is very robust, while Gadgets approach with installable handlers was flaky and confusing in my hands.

On the other hand, Gadgets is the only graphically rich Oberon environment which I am aware of, which offers a remote hope to run on RISC5. It is a huge potential advantage which is hard to beat. 

W.