[Oberon] Re (2): Links for the Oberon-2 report.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 at 14:56, Jörg <joerg.straube at iaeth.ch> wrote:
>
> Liam
> RTF = Rich TEXT Format has text in its name but is not pure ASCII.
> Fact: Oberon-Text files are not .txt files.

Jörg, I am not sure how to interpret your replies.

I get it. Oberon text files are not plain text. They contain
formatting and other info, just like RTF does.

But my point is pretty simple and clear, I thought, and I can't tell
if you do not get it, or are just determined to correct me.

*I know that they are not text.* However, it is also a fact that they
are _called_ "text", and that word has a standard agreed meaning in
the computer world, which it seems that Oberon does not respect.

You remind me of the Emacs enthusiasts, who will not accept that one
of my principle objections to learning Emacs is that it does not use
the de-facto industry-standard terms to describe its operation. On
Emacs, a file window is not called a window, it is called a "buffer"
or something. My keyboard does not have an "alt" key, it has a "meta"
key -- despite the fact that no manufacturer has made a keyboard with
a "meta" key on it in about 40 years, and everything, from DEC VAX and
Sun terminals to Commodore Amigas and Atari STs had "alt", "ctrl" and
"shift" keys.

If you want me to try your program, then refer to the keys by what the
keys have printed on them. Do not call them by some name used by an
obsolete computer running an OS that hasn't run natively on anything
in 3 decades. That is not fair or reasonable.

I once knew about 30 different text editors and switched between them.
I am old enough that I date back to CP/M and so on. I knew WordStar
keys and WordPerfect keys and MultiMate keys and DisplayWrite keys and
LocoScript keys and many more.

But after the 1980s, things settled down. Standardisation happened,
including things like IBM CUA --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access -- and that was a
good thing.

Since then, there has been a standard UI for apps, and it works across
DOS and Windows and OS/2 and classic MacOS and Mac OS X and every
major Linux desktop, from KDE to GNOME to XFCE to LXQt.

I don't have to remember that to mark a block is Ctrl-K B and Ctrl-K K
any more. I select it with the mouse or shifted cursor keys, in
everything. It's great. I love this. It makes me very happy to only
remember one set of keystrokes.

I refuse to go out of my way to learn an editor that still uses 1970s
terms and 1970s keystrokes, and it doesn't matter how powerful that
editor is -- because there are hundreds of powerful editors that _do_
use the UI that  my muscle memory expects.

Similarly, across all those OSes, "a text file" means the same thing,
_pace_ small differences in encoding and character set.

I fully understand that this is not true in Oberon but I absolutely do
think that it is fair, reasonable and understandable to see a file
called "README.Text" and expect it to contain plain text!

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053