Robert's BlackBox CV

Self-introduction of "Center" members and persons who applying for membership
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Robert
Posts: 1024
Joined: Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:04 am
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

Robert's BlackBox CV

Post by Robert »

I joined an electronic engineering company in the mid 70's with a pure mathematics degree. This lead to an introduction to computers and FORTRAN for solving numerical problems.

One day we obtained a Pascal compiler, which I tried. I hated it all morning, all that tedious up-front type declaring, the long-winded BEGIN END stuff, the lack of freedom to reuse EQUIVALENCE statements, and the trivial complaints from the compiler error messages.

But the programs worked, and I was freed from the misery of hex dumps and reverse engineering assembler listings. I was instantly converted to type safe languages.

In 1986 I bought an Atari 1040ST and then found a Modula II (which I had never heard of) Atari compiler in the local Hi-Fi shop. Another Wirthian language, and a major improvement on Pascal. A pattern was forming.

In the late 90's I was forced to use a PC, so was on the lookout for a language when I saw an advertisement for Oberon-F (which I had never heard of), but decided to try. It was Oms's version of Oberon 2, and was soon renamed BlackBox, and I have used it ever since.

I have published several major Sub-Systems on Helmut Zinn's CPC website (http://www.zinnamturm.eu/projects.htm#Cam), including:

- 'Lib' implements Vectors, Matrices, Complex numbers, Special Functions, Graphics, general engineering support capabilities.

- 'Algebra' implements more mathematical features: Rings, Fields, Polynomials, Quaternions, Vectors (of arbitrary types), Gaussian Integers, Galois Fields, and Rational functions.

- 'Multi' implements Multiple/Arbitrary precision Integers, Rationals, Reals, & Complex. Fast algorithms for PI to many million digits, and for factoring 50 digits integrs.

- 'Casket' provides compressable Bitmaps, interfaces to FreeImage, an RTF converter, and a Wikipedia like interface to the LaTeX typesetting engine for high quality equation rendering.

- 'Wands' is a varied collection of programmers utilities and Tools.

- 'Escher' is an interesting extensible graphical editor based on geometric constraints. (This is a major reworking of the Brahe Editor which provided the originality and concept. This reworking was a joint effort with Gérard Meunier.)


The above examples, and others, illustrate that my background and interests are more mathematical (both pure and applied) than computer science or software engineering oriented. However I am a strong believer in the importance of simplicity of language and the power of Object and Component methodologies. I am occasionally interested in numerical analysis.


I attended an Oberon training session conducted by Oms at Technoparkstrasse in Zürich in the late 90's.

I presented at the Oberon Day at CERN (http://www.inr.ac.ru/~blackbox/Oberon.D ... ramme.html) in 2004.

I attended the Oberon Day conferences in ETH Zürich in 2007 & 2011 (http://www.oberonday2011.ethz.ch/).

I live and work in Scotland, and hope to retire fairly soon.
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