Release 1.2 is the second major upgrade of Oberon/F. It adds some new features and streamlines a number of existing features. It has an extended and improved documentation with several new examples. And most important: the Windows version now supports OLE2. OpenDoc support for the Mac OS version will become available later, as an incremental update.
New Modules
There are four new modules:
Strings provides a set of string routines, and conversions between strings and numeric types.
Dates provides Date and Time data types and operations on these types.
Services provides various low-level services, which formerly have been in module Controllers. In particular, this is the Action data type.
DevSpy is a tool which allows to graphically inspect the Oberon heap.
Extended bibliography, historical notes, migration notes from Pascal to Oberon, new tutorials.
Improvements
FormCmds->InsertGroup is more general (select controls around which the group should appear).
File, directory, font enumeration facilities have been added (module Files, Fonts).
The user interface of the StdCoder has been improved considerably.
Array handling in the debugger has been improved.
Initialization mechanism has been improved (modules Config and Setup).
The drag & drop protocol has been improved, to better support OLE and OpenDoc drag & drop (module Controllers).
In the Windows version, the copy versus move behavior of drag & drop has been made identical to the OLE behavior.
In the Macintosh version, the handling of low-memory conditions is improved.
In the Macintosh version, Window layouts of documents are now saved on disk.
In the Macintosh version, the Help menu item has moved from the Apple menu to the Help menu (the icon with the question mark).
In the Macintosh version, scripting support has been added.The doScript Apple Event can be used to send a string to Oberon/F. This string may contain an Oberon command sequence. It is the only parameter of doScript.
FormModels.showGrid/View.ShowGrid eliminated; grid bound to container mode instead.
ObxLinks has been modified, and now demonstrates text generation, hyperlink generation, file and locator enumeration, and file converters.
Miscellaneous
The "pseudo-commands" of Release 1.0 have officially been replaced by true parameterized commands. In Release 1.1, the pseudo-commands have still been available to allow for an easier migration. In Release 1.2, they have been eliminated.
The same holds for the command Controls.CloseDialog, which should be replaced by calls to StdCmds.CloseDialog.
In the Windows version, support for OLE2 has been added. Objects may be dragged and dropped between applications, and Oberon/F can act both as an OLE server and as an OLE client (container).
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