[Oberon] [EXT] Re: File transfer;

[Skulski, Wojciech]

>Now, as my PO2013 on Pipistrello runs with 16 MB of RAM, porting V4 seems possible.
>Without going into all details there are TWO main differences of V4 and PO2013:
>a) Texts.Mod is able to incorporate arbitrary „elems“ in the text.
>b) it‘s written in Oberon-2.

>With the more RAM now available, my idea is to bring „elems“ 
>to Texts.Mod. With this, it will be possible that the PO2013 GUI resembles V4.
>But my idea is to stick to Oberon-07 and not enabling all language constructs of Oberon-2.

Joerg:


I could not agree more. Just a small addition: an emulator is a sufficient and inexpensive tool. The amount of memory can be adjusted from 1 M up to ??? M without building the board in advance. A 16-color display will be sufficient for porting most of the traditional Oberon System software. The number of colors and the screen size can be increased to develop new instrumentation-grade software, geological maps, physics courses, etc. This again can be done under the emulator w/o investing effort into color graphics development ahead of time, when the required performance of the color display is not solidly determined yet.

In my opinion, the emulator has only one downside, which is detachment from the actual hardware. It would help if the emulator interface to, for example, Ethernet hardware were crafted ahead of time with a concrete hardware in mind. This is why I mentioned both Wiznet chips, which are the prime candidates for the actual hardware implementation. 

Concerning full Oberon-2, why not? Andres has already implemented most of it. Remaining differences are probably small. Some Oberon-2 features can be admitted and flagged with warnings to make the porting effort less demanding. Ideally, the existing legacy V4 and the new FPGA V4 could be 100% source code compatible. This would be awesome. 

Wojtek