October 2016 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

New member of OLR family: RISC-V
by Peter Matthias 14 Oct '16

14 Oct '16

Hi all, I am proud to welcome a new member of the Oberon/Linux Revival family. The compiler is based on the MIPS compiler and the RISC-V system should behave exactly as the MIPS system. Instructions for installation are here: http://oberon.wikidot.com/rop2compiler Regards, Peter

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Announcement: Oberon for Raspberry Pi under 32-bit Raspbian available
by Josef Templ 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

Hi everybody, I would like to announce the availability of an Oberon version for the Raspberry Pi running 32-bit Raspbian. You can download it from http://www.software-templ.com/shareware.html. This version of Oberon is based on ofront 1.4, an Oberon-2 to C translator. It comes with a set of command line tools and an integrated version based on the Oberon V4 system. Oberon modules can be compiled and linked into shared object libraries (.so) and loaded and unloaded from within the Oberon system. A complete Oberon interface for the popular 'Wiring' library (libwiring.so) is included. This library can be used for convenient access to the Raspberry's I/O hardware. - Josef

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Re: [Oberon] COPY() removing
by Chris Burrows 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

> -----Original Message----- > From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces@lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of > Stéphane Aulery > Sent: Thursday, 13 October 2016 9:51 PM > To: ETH Oberon and related systems > Subject: [Oberon] Fwd: A little weakness of operators syntax and > COPY() removing > > > I find also a possible minor error in > > https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf > > page 15. > > But COPY have been removed according to > > https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/OberonAtAGlance.pdf > > for the whole language or only outside SYSTEM module? > This is not an error in the report. "Oberon at a glance" could be expanded perhaps. COPY and SYSTEM.COPY are two different functions: 1. The Standard Procedure COPY that was removed used to be defined as: Name: COPY(x, v) Argument types: x: character array, string v: character array. Function: string v := x It became redundant because character arrays and strings can now be assigned to character arrays just be using the assignment operator ':='. 2. The new SYSTEM procedure SYSTEM.COPY has a different purpose. Name: SYSTEM.COPY(src, dst, n) Argument types: all INTEGER Function: copy n consecutive words from src to dst Regards, Chris Burrows CFB Software http://www.astrobe.com

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Re (2): Parts & paths.
by peter＠easthope.ca 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

From: eas lab <lab.eas(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 07:03:31 +0200 > I didn't see that when I used N-O ?? Desktops.OpenDoc "http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/betadocu.html#OFS" > ... LNO & ALO are restricted to files > in their own-single directory? ?? System.Directory /usr/bin/fire* ... -------------------------------- Directory | System.Close System.Copy System.Grow ET.Search ET.Store /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-esr 2 files -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel: +1 360 639 0202 Pender Is.: +1 250 629 3757 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re: [Oberon] frames, displays and screens;
by peter＠easthope.ca 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

From: Andreas Pirklbauer <andreas_pirklbauer(a)yahoo.com> Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 14:17:51 +0200 > In essence one can create sev= > eral (separate!) logical display areas that all look like the standard Obero= > n display (works like virtual screens in macOS, i.e. one can just switch fro= > m one to another). OK, thanks. Rather than scroll a big display up-down and left-right on a smaller screen, the user will jump from one logical screen to another. Both scrolling and jumping could be in one system. Eg. arrange your virtual screens vertically (or horizontally) and allow scrolling and jumping up/down (or left/right). > It's just a small experiment to prepare Oberon for a tablet version. Seems you are on the right track. Thanks! ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re (2): revisions in sources.
by peter＠easthope.ca 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

80 or 90% of my previous message was truncated. Trying again with some errors corrected. From: chris at cfbsoftware.com (Chris Burrows), Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2016 18:01:27 +0930 > I can't speak for NO ... My primary interest in Oberon is for use as a personal workstation. At present, many of the workstation functionalities in NO have not been adopted into a FPGA Oberon. >From chris at cfbsoftware.com Sat Sep 17 02:04:36 2016 > Not correct ... My apologies. Will try a restatement. Usually a software package is distributed in it's latest form. Distribution of an old version, with a textual description of revisions for the user to make, is unusual. When the revision list is too long it is infeasible. >From chris at cfbsoftware.com Thu May 7 00:19:29 2015 > That is the intention of the *existing* Oberon Community Platform > from ETH. It has a wiki, forum etc. > http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/ Yes, OCP is admirable. I've contributed to it. Three significant capabilities are not in the OCP and are available with MediaWiki. Page specific history. Convenient difference display. Page specific discussion. >From joerg.straube at iaeth.ch Wed Apr 20 18:50:55 2016 > I would appreciate a repository of ProjectOberon, where the > community can contribute instead of having independent forks. When two articles in Wikipedia address the same topic they are merged. Sooner or later. Very few competing articles on one topic survive more than a few years before merger. Eventally sanity prevails over ego. > In my point of view, WikiBook doesn't seem to be the best choice for this task. Acknowleged. Better possibilities? Bernhard mentioned difficulty in configuring Sourceforge to archive Oberon source Texts while allowing convenient reading by a human. I can't cite his note at present. Oberon sources appear almost as plain texts. In a few places recent revisions are colored. The visual appearance is easily achieved with HTML. Therefore a question. Would a MediaWiki publication of sources as ASCII or HTML, having the same visual appearance as in Oberon, violate the ETH license? I can't discern the answer. Currently these are the two most relevant forms. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:About_Wikisource Hypothetically there might be a MediaOberon which handes a Text without corruption. Regards, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Who knows hardware?
by eas lab 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

Since we/NW initiated the FPGA project, some readers must know hardware: to the extent of the Intel x32/x64 compatibility for software. As I remember, the transition from 16 to 32 bit consisted of: doubling the adr-bus width; the pairing of certain registers/accumulators to make 32-bit wide data-transfers. Later, the complexity/mess of adding <sector registers> made paging possible. This was not used by Motorola's 68X series which was the alternative to Intel, and had a nice regular structure. AFAIK, for backwards compatibility [which has been the basis of WinTel's market dominance] the eg. single-byte operations, still existed, with the same 'code' as the 16 bit CPUs in the 32 bit CPUs. Do the original 16-bit instructions still exist in the 64bit CPUs? How is it that W32lynx runs in this Win8.1 x64, but all other 32bit *.exe that I try, fail? We know that the old PCs had a security problem, in that at start-up, the BIOS could be set to boot from an intruder's own USB device, thereby giving him access to the *owner's* internal disk/s. Documentation claims that that vunerability has now been removed. But it seems to have just been replaced by time wasting complexity, because we can still change the "boot device priority order". Perhaps I can search our mail-list archive, for that Russian ETHO which may run on Win8.1 x64, since ftp & http to ethz sites, shows only the GOOD old stuff? I desperately need an ETHO-like system, that allows multiple text windows accessibility, and mouse driven, to 'fit' this cursed laptop which the vendor has already cycled through Win8.1 32-bit, Win10, Win8.1 64bit, in order to match the ISP's hardware. == Chris Glur. PS. who remembers, was it in the 70's, that it was published that Intel was to release a CPU that was to be directly programmed in High Level Language? In those "fifth generation" days when AI was booming, and the Japanese auto industry was swallowing the "infinite frontier mentality" US auto industry, Intel's new Uproc was later exposed to have several undocumented instructions. The explanation was that the design was flawed, and that the description and user manual, was written to fit how the manufactured devices popped-out, rather than how they had been intended to be, by design. Marketing Trumps technology!

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Parts & paths; was Re (3): A path variable for OLR?
by peter＠easthope.ca 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

From: Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias(a)web.de> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 18:57:24 +0200 > If file is not in "WRK:", "SYS:" will be used for reading. "SYS:" > defaults to "." and can be set by "OSYSDIR=/dir". Nice. > Both dirs can be set by FileTools.SetSYS resp. FileTools.SetWRK. Native Oberon has the slightly different arrangement. "OFSTools.SetDefault WRK ~" moves WRK to the front of the search list. An arbitrary number of volumes can be ordered. ** ETHO Behaviour ** Volume containing executables is automatically SYS. FileSystem.Mount WRK1 AosFS <volume1> ~ FileSystem.Mount WRK2 AosFS <volume2> ~ FileSystem.Mount WRK3 AosFS <volume3> ~ OFSTools.SetDefault WRK3 ~ OFSTools.SetDefault WRK2 ~ OFSTools.SetDefault WRK1 ~ makes search path WRK1 WRK2 WRK3 SYS ** OLR analogue ** FileTools.Set SYS <path0> ~ FileTools.Set WRK1 <path1> ~ FileTools.Set WRK2 <path2> ~ FileTools.Set WRK3 <path3> ~ FileTools.SetDefault WRK3 ~ FileTools.SetDefault WRK2 ~ FileTools.SetDefault WRK1 ~ makes search path WRK1 WRK2 WRK3 SYS Regards, Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re (2): Oberon and TLS; was A2.
by peter＠easthope.ca 12 Oct '16

12 Oct '16

From: eas lab <lab.eas(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2016 05:14:10 +0200 > ... Win8.1-laptop can do the inet fetching, Probably, although a router is cheaper and more efficient. > How difficult is it to talk from Win8.1 x64 to Linux? Must be too many Web pages about that. > Thanks for any pointers. Incidentally, a smartphone with Wi-Fi, in access-point mode, is another way to connect to the 'net. Regards, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel: +1 360 639 0202 Pender Is.: +1 250 629 3757 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re (n): RISC-5.
by peter＠easthope.ca 12 Oct '16

12 Oct '16

From: eas lab <lab.eas(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2016 06:19:36 +0200 > Can you post a URL of any recent <html of cached pdf> ? Google of "site:inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ oberon 2016" yields "[PDF] The Programming Language Oberon-07 https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon07.Report.pdf" with a small triangle following "pdf". Click on the triangle and choose Cached. That will open an HTML version with this URI. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3QeRGM9ZngAJ:https://… Regards, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel: +1 360 639 0202 Pender Is.: +1 250 629 3757 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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