The system, not necessarily the language. I quote from Martin Reiser's book, The Oberon System, ACM Press, NY 1991, p. 4: [The Oberon user interface A user, looking at the screen of a typical computer terminal or personal computer, sees, most of the time, lines of text. He or she has mastered the concept of the cursor, a point where text can be entered or deleted. However, the user quickly learn that text is not text. It is a *volatile* text in the sense that it cannot be saved, printed or edited. Text can only be entered in the bottom line in which case it is a command. This user has discovered that text is *modal*: it's either a system message or editable text or a command. Later generations of software introduced menus: commands are displayed in lists, ready for execution by pointing. However, menus are distinct from editable texts. If a menu command requests parameters, a so-called dialog box is opened. A new mode is entered. The user must complete the box before he or she is allowed to continue. The Oberon user interface departs radically from the standard models. The concepts of the command line and menus are absent.] Et cetera ... --> Reiser's book. I think: it could /maybe/ be nice to have, with Blackbox, this alternative: the possibility to use something like Oberon's System Tracks (see the reference) in substitution of menus; possibility that might decided at ./configure time. What do you believe? (I would not vacillate too much.) Notice that Oberon's "radically" departure from the standard models it's a little bit theatrical: these are of course ideas which have been used in laboratories since time; things like Plan 9, Brazil et cetera should reckon on them too; there are old IEEE issues (and probably other publications) which describe more or less convoluted models (which often come from, or are used with lisp and smalltalk): this is not stuff a' la 007, nor from Los Alamos (or maybe also); but it should not be patentable stuff ... or then someone can patent the way a right hand may be used too, for example.
