[9fans] tabs, acme

[9fans] tabs, acme

[C H Forsyth]

what did the Oberon system do with tabs, out
of interest?  i'd check its source but
i can't find my copy.  i recall (perhaps wrongly)
it using proportional typefaces.

actually, it's also slightly relevant
to presotto's comment about fancy editors,
because Oberon did store its program text
as a form of structured Text.
not as big, bulky and complex as XML, which
it preceded by many years, and it
worked quite well, with some mildly useful things you
could do with it, so obviously THAT had to go ...

Re: [9fans] tabs, acme (Oberon)

[Brantley Coile]

I couldn't find it in my copy of `Project Oberon', but I
seem to remember that you could set rulers in the text
to change the tab stops.  Not that they seem to use
it for code.  The tab stops defaulted to something like
3 or 4 chars which fit the Swiss coding style.

For those who have never read any Wirthian code, it reads
like the stuff you see in old papers with ALGOL.
	IF a > b THEN Display.WriteString("Ooops"; Dislpay.WriteLn END
You could also change the color on the fly.  That
adds more dimension to the coding style problem.

And you would see lots of test coditions nested like:
	IF C = TRUE THEN
	   IF D = TRUE THEN
	      IF E = FALSE THEN
	         something1; something2
	      ELSE error(4) END
	   ELSE error(3) END
	ELSE error(2) END
They have only four levels of operator
precedence in Oberon.

And they don't like columns.  Seem to think it
means you're writing assembler with a list of
instructions.  But what is a program but a list
of instructions?

 Brantley

P. S. Don't get the wrong impression; there are a ton of
great ideas in Oberon the language and Oberon the system.
I discovered, however, that I'm hopelessly saturated
with Unixisms.

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 21:29:25 +0100, C H Forsyth <forsyth@vitanuova.com> wrote:

> what did the Oberon system do with tabs, out
> of interest?  i'd check its source but
> i can't find my copy.  i recall (perhaps wrongly)
> it using proportional typefaces.
>
> actually, it's also slightly relevant
> to presotto's comment about fancy editors,
> because Oberon did store its program text
> as a form of structured Text.
> not as big, bulky and complex as XML, which
> it preceded by many years, and it
> worked quite well, with some mildly useful things you
> could do with it, so obviously THAT had to go ...
>

Re: [9fans] tabs, acme (Oberon)

[Fco.J.Ballesteros]

I think tab stops should be just that, tab stops. Let's say you have 5,
and I'd expect the editor to arrange for them to be equally spaced over the
available window width. Of course, I'd also expect to be able to adjust them.