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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
- Path: sparky!uunet!psinntp!newstand.syr.edu!greeny
- From: greeny@top.cis.syr.edu (J. S. Greenfield)
- Subject: Re: MacOberon
- Message-ID: <1992Jul30.020613.17378@newstand.syr.edu>
- Organization: Syracuse University, CIS Dept.
- References: <1992Jul28.231712.27337@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1992Jul29.154809.16204@gvl.unisys.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 02:06:12 EDT
- Lines: 88
-
- In article <1992Jul29.154809.16204@gvl.unisys.com> dave@prc.unisys.com (David Lee Matuszek) writes:
- >
- >MacOberon "works" on my Mac (13" monitor). However, the interface is
- >a real show stopper. Even if you assume the author had no particular
- >reason to follow Apple's interface guidelines, it's still a disaster.
- >For example, the "scroll bars" work by holding down some modifier key
- >while you click with the mouse to move the selected line to the top of
- >the window--but this leaves you with NO WAY to scroll backwards!
- >Although MacOberon seems to have quite a bit of documentation, you are
- >on your own when it comes to figuring out what to read first.
-
- Actually, I found the interface to be a bit awkward, but there a few
- reasons for this--
-
- 1) The package is designed for a three-button mouse. Since the Mac standard
- is a single-button mouse, they use modifier keys to simulate the two other
- mouse keys. (And the documentation does specify how to program the buttons
- on a three button mouse in order to make it a "standard" Oberon three-button
- mouse--basically, you just define two of the buttons to act like modifier
- keys.) BTW, you can scroll backwards, but only all the way back to the
- top of a document. I suspect that this is an indication that Oberon
- documents are typically short.
-
- 2) Oberon is designed to be portable. As such it should have as standard
- an interface as possible, regardless of which machine it is running on.
- Since the MacOS routines are not available on all of the other machines, you
- shouldn't expect that the system will be based around a mac interface.
-
- 3) I seriously doubt that Wirth's interest was to spend time and energy
- developing a beautiful and full blown interface. Rather, I'm sure he
- decided to develop a basic interface, and devote most of the effort toward
- the real meat of whatever Oberon is...
-
-
- Also, though the documentation may not be award-winning, the system does
- tell you which file should open to get various information.
-
- The biggest problem I had was figuring out why I was getting blown out of
- the water every time I booted MacOberon. It turns out that it is incompatible
- with AutoDoubler...
-
-
- >I downloaded MacOberon because I wanted to find out something about
- >the Oberon language, but decided I didn't want to know badly enough to
- >hassle with the brain-dead interface. (My interest was only casual;
- >someone with more motivation could probably succeed.)
- >
- >I don't know if the interface is incidental or integral to Oberon. If
- >incidental, then, as you say, you can't fault somebody for making a
- >free port, and maybe somebody will someday do a better job. But it
- >looked as if the interface was part of the Oberon design, and in that
- >case you have to wonder if the rest of the language is done as badly
- >and with as little regard to state-of-the-art techniques.
-
- Well, I'd say it's integral in the sense that it is undoubtedly *standardized*
- for all Oberon implementations. But it is probably incidental int he sense
- that the fundamental ideas of Oberon are not dependent on how the windows
- scroll...
-
- As I mentioned above, you really can't fault someone who creates a language
- (which I can only imagine is intended first and foremost as a research tool
- for new language/OS concepts) and decides that they are not going to
- spend their life developing a master interface.
-
- Would you rather be the person who created Pascal, or, say, one of the many
- people who developed THINK Pascal?
-
- (And that's not to put down TP which I think is a great package. It's just
- to point out that you wouldn't expect Wirth to create Pascal *and* spend
- his time developing a great (on the whole) interface like TP. First things
- first.)
-
-
- >Comments are welcome. I'd be especially interested in hearing whether
- >anyone thinks Oberon itself is neat enough to be worth the trouble of
- >learning the interface.
-
- For myself, I don't know. I had been under the impression that Oberon
- was intended to support distributed processes, but it didn't look that way
- to me when I check out MacOberon. Then again, I didn't spend much time
- with it, since having to shut off AD is a real pain...
-
-
- --
- J. S. Greenfield greeny@top.cis.syr.edu
- (I like to put 'greeny' here,
- but my d*mn system wants a
- *real* name!) "What's the difference between an orange?"
-