Progress bars/portability

Stan Warford (warford@pepperdine.edu)
Sun, 16 Jun 96 18:29:32 PDT

Thanks to Bruno for good examples of Oberon/F source code
with the progress bars.

Regarding the question about portability to Mac platform,
it worked fine on my PowerMac (under 680x0 emulation) with
two modifications:

(a) minor adjustments in the spacing and size of the forms
(b) elimination of ".odc" in the file names in the source
code as in

StdCmds.OpenToolDialog('Priv/Rsrc/Progtest.odc', 'Progress Test')

Perhaps OMI could consider making OpenToolDialog more intelligent
in future releases. When I am porting between Windows and Mac
platforms I notice that Encode and Decode are intelligent enough
to leave out the ".odc" when decoding documents on the Mac
platform even if they were encoded with ".odc" on the Windows
platform. But the source code must still be changed to

StdCmds.OpenToolDialog('Priv/Rsrc/Progtest', 'Progress Test')

To make the source code more portable, I must put in a runtime
test to detect which platform the module is running under and
include or exclude ".odc" accordingly. It would be nice to
have OpenToolDialog append ".odc" automatically to its first
parameter if necessary. Then, for portability, developers
could be encouraged to not include .odc in their parameters.

Just a suggestion. :)

Stan Warford
Pepperdine University
warford@pepperdine.edu