[Oberon] all in one git tree

[Jörg Straube]

Guy

> Would it be better to have ASCII (or UTF-8 or whatever) files that would simplify
> so much the interaction with other systems? If it is for code
> embellishment on screen and printout, what about implementing these
> features in tools at the OS level, as every other system do?

Every other system I know is based on the following idea: boot in ASCII-mode and extend to some sort of graphics engine.
With Oberon it’s the other way around. There is no ASCII-mode. The whole system is "XWindows-like“.
You don’t have an XTerminal emulating ASCII-mode in an XWindows environment.

All texts (including source code) are documents with fonts, colors, and other meta data.
The compiler - as all other "text tools“ - is working on documents. The OS offers open, create, read and write routines for this document base type. The programmer never has to care whether it’s ASCII or not. There is no distinction between Edlin/vi and Word.
You can highlight code snippets with bold or colored font if you like.
Source code is not only for the compiler but for the human programmer as well.

The issues we discuss here only arise when you jump between OSes and want to use tools for one OS on another OS.

When you jump between Windows and Linux you have/had similar issues (perhaps without being aware of)
THE ASCII file per se does not exist.
- Newlines still differ
- code pages differ (has improved with the invention of Unicode, but OSes differ in their internal representation UTF-8, UTF-16..)
- case sensitivity of file names still differ
- allowed characters in file names differ
- possible length of file names differ
- directory or path delimiter differ
etc

All these file name thingy are important as I expect you want to include/import other source files into your code.

br
Jörg