Re: Blackbox Oberon in the real world

From: Douglas G. Danforth <"Douglas>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 12:56:25 -0500

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"Wijck, Bart van" wrote:
....
> All that would begin to address 4 out of Brett's 5 central criticisms,
> without a huge effort on behalf of anyone. Particularly the primer (which to
> my mind can contain useful stuff or references from the rest of the BlackBox
> universe too) would have a centralising function on how to do things instead
> of the more vague notion that somewhere there's a feature which might help
> (with due respect for Zinn's archive etc.).

Might I suggest a "Cookbook" format for the user primer
which has a *bottom up* presentation format. The document is broken
into sections (such as SECTION Files). Each section consists
of three parts starting from the specific and moving
toward the more general and abstract: EXAMPLE, DISCUSSION, ABSTRACTION.
The examples are code fragments that need to be embedded in modules
and procedures such as,

SECTION Files

EXAMPLE of opening an existing file:
        IMPORT Files;
        VAR file: Files.File; path, name: ARRAY 32 OF CHAR;
        file := Files.dir.Old(Files.dir.This(path), name$, Files.shared);

DISCUSSION of example:
        directories, Old, Locators, ...

ABSTRACT File handling
        ... (discusion of converters) ...


In this way a new user can program immediately from the examples without
first having to assimilate the whole abstract structure. With
experience
the need and generality of the abstractions will then become apparent
(or not if nothing more than the example forms are needed).

-Doug
--------------------------------------------

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Received on Tue Feb 11 2003 - 18:56:25 UTC