[Oberon] Small effort to add functional/piping ability ?

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> eas lab
> Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2018 2:09 AM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Oberon] Small effort to add functional/piping ability ?
> 
> A somewhat contrived example is solving the intolerable situation
> that ETHO doesn't show you the most recent files of a directory.
> 
> Imagine having a directory of 88 files, some of which are 2 years
> old, and you want to continue with the project that you last worked
> on.
> 3 days ago.
> 
> Obviously you want immediate access to the most recent [say  6] files
> which you <left on top of the work pile>.
> 

While pipes can be a useful feature for chaining commands your example
should not be relevant to an Oberon user. Oberon is not Linux - Oberon is
not a file-centric system. 

If an experienced Oberon user had been working on an Oberon project three
days ago (e.g. HCFiler) they would already have created a tool (e.g.
HCFiler.Tool) that included all of the commands that they needed to work on
that project. The only filename they may need to remember is the name of the
tool. If they used the tool regularly then they would have included the tool
name on their System.Tool.

Tools are just text files - you can modify them even while you are using
them. If you are not familiar with the Tool Viewer concept in Oberon there
are five pages describing it in section 2.6 of Martin Reiser's book that I
recommended yesterday. It starts by saying:

"A text viewer which displays a set of commands is called a tool viewer, a
novel concept which is a blend of the two paradigms 'remember and
type' and 'point and click.'"

Regards,
Chris Burrows

CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com/RISC5