From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] tabs, acme (Oberon) References: Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15; format=flowed From: Brantley Coile MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Opera7.11/Win32 M2 build 2887 Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 06:59:54 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 706a22a6-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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 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 ... >