Oberon Object Tiler Link -

“Oberon links A→B. Ghost tiles fade from cyan to purple. Dragging the link handle spawns a live ‘echo chain’ preview. Click ‘Commit Trail’ to bake.”

The "Link" is the central innovation of this architecture. It serves as the bidirectional bridge between the logical display tree (the user's document) and the physical tile grid (the renderer).

Because the heap is tiled, the linker must cooperate with the memory allocator to place the module’s code and static data into appropriately sized tiles. For example:

The linker also updates a global symbol table (hash map) that maps exported names to entry points. This table is shared between the tiler (UI) and the loader. oberon object tiler link

When you link two or more objects in the tiler, the system predicts and auto-suggests tiling patterns based on object attributes (color, shape, rotation, semantic tags) and previous manual placements.

Due to the age of Oberon (first release 1988), many original references have vanished. However, you can still find live traces of the "Oberon Object Tiler Link" in:

To understand the keyword concretely, consider this excerpt from an original Oberon System3 Display module (simplified for clarity): “Oberon links A→B

MODULE Tiler;
  TYPE
    Object* = POINTER TO ObjectDesc;
    ObjectDesc = RECORD
      next*: Object;   (* This is the "Link" *)
      x, y, w, h: INTEGER;
      draw: PROCEDURE (obj: Object; VAR frame: Frame);
    END;
VAR root*: Object;   (* Head of the Tiler Link list *)
PROCEDURE Link*(obj: Object);
BEGIN
obj.next := root;
root := obj
END Link;
PROCEDURE TraverseAndDraw*(clip: Frame);
VAR cur: Object;
BEGIN
cur := root;
WHILE cur # NIL DO
IF Overlaps(cur, clip) THEN
cur.draw(cur, clip)
END;
cur := cur.next   (* Follow the Link *)
END
END TraverseAndDraw;
END Tiler.
 The  "Link"  is the central innovation of this architecture

In this code, the "Object Tiler Link" is explicitly the next field. The TraverseAndDraw procedure links through the object chain via cur := cur.next. This is the canonical meaning.

A standard implementation defines a tile size ($T_w \times T_h$) typically ranging from $32 \times 32$ to $256 \times 256$ pixels. The screen is a grid of $N \times M$ tiles.