Re: Is ASCII I/O really neccessary?

Marc Martin (mmartin@cnw.com)
Sat, 31 Aug 1996 08:18:26 -0800

Bruno- of course you *can* argue that ASCII I/O is *theoretically* not
neccessary any more, but some of us are still surrounded by coworkers who
are programming in Fortran, using tools created in the 70's which use
ASCII files for input and output, or work on a variety of different
platforms which couldn't read and .ODC or .DOC or .RTF file if it had to!
Also, when doing engineering analysis, advanced formatting isn't really
all that important -- a portable file format like ASCII *is*, however.
And if you look around, you'll see that a fairly high percentage of
Oberon/F users are engineers -- people looking for an easier/more portable
way to create their own analysis programs.

When I first started using Oberon/F, I did indeed consider abandoning
ASCII in favor of .ODC for all of my input/output files, but I later
decided that this was not a very good idea, as these files need to be read
by people who don't have an Oberon/F compiler on their computer --
however, they do have Notepad, Word, Excel, which can all read an ASCII
file just fine.

Unfortunately, I think that Oberon Microsystems probably *does* agree with
you Bruno, and it is indeed a shame that a software vendor can be so out
of touch with it's users...

--
Marc Martin, marc.martin@boeing.com