More Ascii Text Modules.

Drew Mayo (e1425277@watt.lab.eese.bee.qut.edu.au)
Sun, 01 Sep 1996 23:36:16 +1000 (EST)

Greetings everyone, I am an undergraduate Engineering/Information
Technology student at QUT, Brisbane, Australia...

I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments on the (increasingly
heated) topic of a standardised Ascii Text module for Oberon/F. Please
note that being a relative newcomer to this language, my viewpoint may be
slightly coloured by my limited experience... :)

1) A contributor arguing that the current Oberon/F situation is
sufficient stated a number of times that since system portability was
paramount in this language, Ascii text could not be supported any more
clearly than it is currently.
Surely an extremely simplified version (the log window) is already
implemented by Oberon/F! If this simplicity is acceptable, why would
a standard text module not be?

2) The same contributor also implied that at least one of the people
involved in the discussion was unqualified to make an educated
submission to the argument, due to his(?) lack of systems-programming
experience.
With all due respect, my current university studies have highlighted
the need for programmers and developers to converse more with the
end-users! Most end users care little for the implementation
problems, all they really want is a working system.
As an example, would a non software-developer _care_ about the
inefficiencies of operator overloading? It is, after all, a compiler
problem, not a user problem.

It seems that this debate hinges primarily upon the 'power' vs
'simplicity' dilemma. It is true that the current situation gies the
user significant power advantages in the _way_ in which they choose to
work. It is, however, also true that it makes the user more responsible
for the efficiency of their program, something which does not translate
well to the system portability argument.

For example, the user chooses Algoritm X for his/her text output, after
carefully evaluating the efficiency on the target machine. When the new
Oberon/F for NewMachine is released, the user happily ports the system
across, only to discover that performance is now sluggish. In the
opposite case, the user who has little control over the text output
algorithms allows the Oberon developer to choose the most efficient
output format for each machine.

Anyway - It's back to learning Oberon for my assignment... :)

-- Drew Mayo
d.mayo@student.qut.edu.au
e1425277@watt.lab.eese.bee.qut.edu.au
n1425277@student.fit.qut.edu.au