Some ideas on ETH-oberon & Linux/C relationship

[n***@absamail.co.za]

I've read the criticism/defence by the C originator[s] re. 'criticism
from Pascal'. An important aspect was about the 'unsafe arrays'.

I could believe that 'wiki has been there all the time' except that
the articles are dated [latest edit] and I'm astounded at what's
available via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ these days.

Wikipedia has exeeded the expectation of the idea which I had been
promoting: contributions/effort which instead of aging and breaking,
gets refined & better by usage.

Recently I've been led to a 'tree' of wikipedia articles which deal with
the various types of problems [virus, worms etc.] which are possible
because of the unsafe arrays of C. It's strange to me that no one
raises the question of 'languages that avoid the unsafe arrays
problem'. OTHOH wikipedia will tend to be a [well formatted &
easilyn accessible] repository of main-stream knowledge.
Ie. NOT original/contraversial ideas. It could even tend towards
more dumbing-down towards the herd-opinion ?

OTOH I think that ETH-oberon should continue to track linux, to
tap into and benefit from the big contributor knowledge base.

I remember that Turbo Pascal had a substantial library of procs/funcs.

Would Linux/C's library be partly a good guide to a suitable
similar Oberon library ? Perhaps OOC has already solved this ?

I think linux/C could be used somewhat as one has references to
ancient Greek & Roman. Ie. to avoid repeating the same research
and mistakes.

A tool which assisted to eg. transform a linux/C device driver to
ETH-oberon syntax shouldn't be very difficult to build, and would
be of great value. It need not be automagically-deterministic.
Even if it's partly like Bablefish. What happened to Bablefish ?

Again a tool that can be used soon, but can continue to evolve
with increased usage -- probably 'data driven programming' --
is the way to go ?
-----------

Feedback on ETH-oberon via linux:
Using the linux ppp, sure solved the N-O ppp problem.
I've still found no good reason why ISPs don't feed back an engaged
signal, to avoid the client the cost of a call which can't get/give data
because of system overload.

Amazingly ETH-oberon fetches http also when connecting via linux/ppp.
And well, for simple/reasonable web-pages.
IMO most web-pages which use elaborate facilities do so as a
substitute for valuable content. Gmail eg. is a disaster !

Apparently ETH-oberon communicates with the linux ppp socket ?
It would be nice if email & nntp sockets of linux could also
communicate with ETH-oberon. Is that difficult to do ?

Thanks,

== Chris Glur.

[Andreas F. Borchert]

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.oberon.]

Post by n***@absamail.co.za
Would Linux/C's library be partly a good guide to a suitable
similar Oberon library ?

The libc is certainly not a good guide:

* Buffer overruns are not ruled out by design: gets, sscanf etc.
* Interface inconsistencies: gets vs fgets, fgets vs fscanf (note
the position of the file stream parameter)
* Bad interfaces like that of getchar() whose return code
can be a character or an error code
* Particularly bad buffering system which
- ignores the block structure of underlying file systems, and
- does not support bidirectional buffering
* No provisions exist such that independent libraries can cooperate
with each other in
- signal handling,
- setting up alarms, and
- tracking childs.

(Please note that I do not want to bash Ritchie, Kernighan etc. The
libc is history and should be taken as such. It is time to abandon
C and the libc and it does not help to place other systems (like
Java) on top of this historic relic.)

Take a look at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
why C and libc win in comparison to Lisp and Scheme.

However, if you are looking for an Oberon library that works as
an replacement of libc, you might want to take a look at Ulm's
Oberon System [1] which is also available for Linux. And it neither
depends on C or libc nor does it contain even a single line of
C code.

Andreas.

[1] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/
Linux Gentoo users might want to use
ftp://ftp.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/pub/soft/oberon/ulm/i386/ulm-oberon-i386-0.8.6.ebuild.tar.bz2
The packages consist of Oberon sources and binaries which allow
to bootstrap the system. The linux port is still beta and not yet
finished. The core libraries are, however, quite stable since more
than ten years.

[news]

Post by Andreas F. Borchert
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.oberon.]

Post by n***@absamail.co.za
Would Linux/C's library be partly a good guide to a suitable
similar Oberon library ?

* Buffer overruns are not ruled out by design: gets, sscanf etc.
* Interface inconsistencies: gets vs fgets, fgets vs fscanf (note
the position of the file stream parameter)
* Bad interfaces like that of getchar() whose return code
can be a character or an error code
* Particularly bad buffering system which
- ignores the block structure of underlying file systems, and
- does not support bidirectional buffering
* No provisions exist such that independent libraries can cooperate
with each other in
- signal handling,
- setting up alarms, and
- tracking childs.

See my other thread related to this.
These are problems related to C,
and not related to using libraries.
Perhaps sufficient thought has gone into java to decide, WHAT libraries
to implement, and how to 'group' the 'methods' ?

Post by Andreas F. Borchert
(Please note that I do not want to bash Ritchie, Kernighan etc. The
libc is history and should be taken as such. It is time to abandon
C and the libc and it does not help to place other systems (like
Java) on top of this historic relic.)
Take a look at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
why C and libc win in comparison to Lisp and Scheme.
However, if you are looking for an Oberon library that works as
an replacement of libc, you might want to take a look at Ulm's
Oberon System [1] which is also available for Linux. And it neither
depends on C or libc nor does it contain even a single line of
C code.
Andreas.
[1] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/
Linux Gentoo users might want to use
ftp://ftp.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/pub/soft/oberon/ulm/i386/\

ulm-oberon-i386-0.8.6.ebuild.tar.bz2

Post by Andreas F. Borchert
The packages consist of Oberon sources and binaries which allow to
bootstrap the system. The linux port is still beta and not yet
finished. The core libraries are, however, quite stable since more
than ten years.

I'm quiet satisfied with ETH native oberon, and for inet facilities which
it lacks [eg full featured browser & robust-ppp], linux-ETH-oberon is good.

Convenient transfer between the oberon-'format' and linux allows eg.
download a *.pdf > linux/pdf2 txt > oberon/superior-text-massage.

== Chris Glur.