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

[Jörg]

Liam

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

Here you go! These „small differences“ appear if you move between OSes.
As long as you are in one OS, everything is consistent.

If you move files from one OS to another, there are two ways
A) Either the target OS understands the format of the source OS
B) Or the source OS exports it in a way the target OS can read it.

As the Oberon OS is not so widely spread as Windows OS, Oberon adapts to Windows not the other way around.
If Oberon is the target, it uses A) and seemlessly opens ASCII files and converts them to Oberon text.
If Oberon is the source it is recommended to use B) and call EditTools.StoreAscii (or similar) to convert Oberon texts to ASCII, so the Windows community is happy.

The discussion we have here is around the presentation layer. (ISO layer 7) Every OS is free to define its presentation layer. If you FTP your files between different OSes, FTP has its own defined presentation layer: if you set the FTP transfer mode to text, a good FTP implementation converts the „OS text format“ to „FTP text format“. So, if you FTP a file between Oberon OS and Windows OS, the result should exactly meet your expectation. If you used „binary“ transfer mode = 1:1 copy, the result might not be as expected.

> 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!

Might be that the Chinese population (~20% of all people) might have another definition of „reasonable“ in respect to 96 readable ASCII characters.
Apparently simple things like (vaguely defined) „text“ is a can of worms.

br
Jörg