OOC text i/o for other Oberons?

[Ian Rae <ianrae@istar.ca>]

I've been following Oberon for several years and am finally finding some
time to actually write some code!  My first project is to create a 
portable ASCII text i/o library that runs on all (or most(!)) Oberons:
V4, System 3, BlackBox, POW, and OOC.  
This will allow text utilities such as grep or COCOS to be written once 
and used throughout the Oberon community.  
Existing utilities such as COCOS will be easier to port if the library 
uses a similar API to V4 Texts.

Your OOC library has already written a text i/o library that looks perfect
for the job.  How would the OOC developers feel about this proposal?

Proposal

This library is an attempt to create portability across all Oberon systems 
for the most common area of programming: text processing.

The library will support manipulation of ASCII texts with the following
basic 
operations: open, read, write, seek, and close.  It will follow the Oberon
notions of carriers and riders, including the (Oberon/F?) notion of mappers
for parsing text into basic data types.

The library will suport texts from a variety of sources:
-ASCII text files
-Text objects of the host Oberon system.  Locator objects will support
 opening Text documents (ie. files), or the Text of the focus view.
    
Issues

1. Scope.  Should just the Text I/O (Carrier, Reader, Writer, Mapper)
classes
be done?  ASCII? Strings?  Any others?

2. UNICODE support?  Is it part of OOC library?

3. Are the sources for the OOC libary changing often or are they pretty
stable
at this point?

Cheers,
--Ian