

Oberon-2, a hi-performance alternative to C++ (1996) - da02
http://www.modulaware.com/mdltws.htm

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srean
I dont exactly remember who said it, perhaps Andrei Alexandrescu, that only a
few other than Nicholas Wirth epitomizes this drive to perfect something with
a persistent passion. Throwing away valiant efforts and starting from the
beginning again and again. He designed Algol(W), Pascal, Modula, Modula-2,
Oberon..Oberon-2. I know none of these languages enough to know how much their
feature sets overlap, but it indeed seems exceptional

~~~
mahmud
Algol(W) comes from the messy world of Algol standardization, has its tails in
the early days of mainframe programming, before structured programming was
fully crystallized, and the modern epoch.

Pascal is a clean up of the early Algol efforts, with committee-designs
removed for the service of CS students. What remained is an excellent academic
language that increasingly had to bow to industry pressures to be "C-like".
Original Pascal was compiled to byte-code, often interpreted, but by the 80s
many Pascals had inline assembly language extensions, OS-specific hooks and
other artifacts of systems programming.

Modula is a much as Wirth's as type-theorists who really created its
foundations, it's far bigger than a one man effort. Modula also saw tremendous
funding & industry support, until it was "eclipsed" by Ada.

Oberon is the Scheme-sized Algol dialect. It's a tiny little programming
language, with its own tiny graphical operating system, tiny compiler, etc.
Closest thing to an "AlgolM" (I'm sure he took more than a hint from the Lisp
school.) Oberon is his meditation on the sublime .. something for future
generations. I would love to see an _Oberon Laptop Per Child_.

~~~
tamberg
Re OLPC: The Ceres computers built at ETH by N. Wirth between 1985 and 1990
came close. They weren't laptops, but had been designed from the ground up
(i.e. hardware, operating system, programming language) to be fully
understandable and teachable. The OS was booted from ROM and took only a few
seconds to show up on the screen. Project Oberon was documented in the book
[http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pd...](http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pdf)

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olaf
"What are Go's ancestors?

Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input from the
Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus some ideas from
languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo
(concurrency). However, it is a new language across the board. In every
respect the language was designed by thinking about what programmers do and
how to make programming, at least the kind of programming we do, more
effective, which means more fun. " source: <http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html>

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olaf
Maybe you want to try the lightweight Windows-GUI-IDE "BlackBox Component
Builder" by Oberon microsystems AG, Zurich (Switzerland), based on "Component
Pascal" (AFAIK an improved Oberon-2 descendant). Latest downloadable version
is 1.6RC6 see <http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html>

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RexRollman
Speaking of Oberon, I always thought the Oberon operating system was kind of
interesting, especially its GUI.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)>

~~~
da02
PDF: Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-
pdf/BC03.pdf>

Google site search for HN for Oberon os:
[https://www.google.com/search?&q=oberon+os+site%3Anews.y...](https://www.google.com/search?&q=oberon+os+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com)

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tamberg
To build native Windows applications in Oberon 2 (later extended and renamed
to Component Pascal) check the free and open source BlackBox IDE and runtime
environment developed by Oberon microsystems
<http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html#Free_Download>

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hsmyers
If you want to play with the current version, try:
<http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/downloads/index> I am fascinated with languages old
and new and might well give this one a shot just to see what is going on. Note
that the above is current, not 1996...

~~~
pdw
I believe all those are versions of Oberon-the-operating-system. For playing
with the language, I'd rather have a stand-alone compiler...

~~~
bavardage
<http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Oxford_Oberon-2_compiler> is one I know
of...

