User talk:Hansklav

Italicization of Comments
Hello Hans, are comments in Oberon source Text italicized routinely? In Native Oberon, Alpha comments are plain text. I ask because I want to improve the MediaWiki module. If comments should always be italicized, the conversion should be automated in MediaWiki.Compile. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 19:25, 23 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Well no, Oberon comments are not italized routinely. Certainly Wirth doesn't use italics. Probably it was Hanspeter Mössenböck who started doing it in his book Object Oriented Programming in Oberon-2. A free PDF of this book can be found here. Imho it makes Oberon source text more easily and pleasantly readable.
 * My main Oberon ("Component Pascal") development environment is BlackBox and there it is one of the source code formatting conventions. The few other font attribute conventions in BlackBox are to use boldface for exported items (except for record fields and method signatures in record declarations), e.g. PROCEDURE Do*, and for keywords which indicate non-local control flow, i.e. RETURN, EXIT, and HALT. These conventions are described in the BlackBox document Programming Conventions. If you don't have access to BlackBox I could send you a PDF of it.
 * If this could be automated in MediaWiki.Compile I would be very happy. Commented-out source text coloured red could be a signal not to italicize that. Hansklav (discuss • contribs) 11:11, 26 June 2017 (UTC)


 * I know some people really prefer BlackBox while others prefer Wirth's more austere style. Therefore I wonder about introducing a V4 context for BlackBox.  Markup could be context specific.  MediaWiki.Compile or MediaWiki.Markup could detect the context and could style accordingly.  Not difficult to include BlackBox and good to avoid alienating those users.  Also retain the austere style for other systems.  If you can work on implementation, good.  In hintsight my MediaWiki.Compile is quite poor.  Have a look at Talk:Oberon/Oberon.MediaWiki.Mod.  Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 26 June 2017 (UTC)


 * BlackBox already has several good repositories of source text, so at the moment there is no pressing need to publish BB source here. But a CP version of MediaWiki.Compile would be a good thing. I'll work on that.
 * I think V4 is not a good context ID for BlackBox, but it would be a good context ID for Oberon V4 (Linz-Oberon). For BlackBox BB would be a good context ID, and CP for Component Pascal source not specifically tied to the BlackBox Framework (there is also Gardens Point Component Pascal).