Re: New Subscriber

Stan Warford (warford@pepperdine.edu)
Tue, 4 Feb 97 13:30:07 PST

Hi Martin,

> I am a new subscriber to the list, and as requested, I am providing a brief
> introduction to myself. I am an Assistant Professor in Biology/Ecology at
> the address below, interested in using Oberon/F for programming tasks
> associated with my research in Conservation and Ecology. I have come from a
> reasonable self-taught background in Pascal and Modula-2, and whilst
> fascinated by the possibilities of Oberon/F, I am finding it tough going at
> the moment. My main interest at the moment is to construct a data-storage
> system in Oberon/F which I can use to store ecological data, and then
> access it for analysis with various idiosyncratic statistical routines,
> especially spatial statistics. I am not making much head way at the moment.

I have a couple of suggestions. First, I'd consider a database or
a statistics package for such an undertaking. They may be better
suited for the task at hand.

If you really want to use Oberon/F, you may want to check out my
I/O modules for one- and two-dimensional arrays. They are much
simpler versions than the scanners and formatters that come with
the system. They are in the style of the familiar Pascal read
and write statements and should be easy to use. They are
available at

ftp://ftp.pepperdine.edu/pub/compsci/oberon/

To use them, you would store your data sets as text in standard
Oberon/F document format. To process data you would open the
document and input from the focus window using the I/O procedures.

Stan Warford
Pepperdine University
warford@pepperdine.edu