Subject: Re: acme for X?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 06:11:58 -0500

Scott says:

>Anyone who is interested in acme should take a look at Oberon, the
>system that inspired it.  Wirth has written a book and a number of
>papers about it.  You can ftp it from neptune.inf.ethz.ch; they have
>binaries for sparc and some other systems.

I'd agree with this -- Oberon is an interesting and very slick system which
is well worth investigating -- anything that manages to pack a GUI, word
processor, compiler, drawing program, mail tool, paint program, terminal
emulator and so on into a few meg is _very_ impressive..

>Anyway, the system is amazingly efficient and elegant.  Everyone I've
>shown it to has said "Wow.", so go check it out while we're waiting
>for the next Plan 9 cd to arrive.

Yes, Oberon is elegant, but not in the same way that Help and Acme are --
it's hard to create ``ad hoc'' tools in Oberon without a fair bit of
programming... It's a nice environment for building and documenting
Oberon programs but I wouldn't want to spend all day in it!

pete
--
 Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group,
 Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD +44 (0)904 433388
 EMAIL: [email-masked] `There's no room for enigmas in built-up areas'