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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#41

Post by 7thaccount »

pjmlp wrote: post #33
carapace wrote: post #19

Project Oberon is awesome! I found the Project Oberon book in SFSU library and read it cover to cover. Such a tight, elegant system. Pretty much complete: Oberon OS includes compiler for Oberon language! Language was self-hosted (compiler written in itself) and Prof. Wirth had a heuristic: no feature could be added to the lang/compiler if it made compiling the compiler slower. There are several emulators, in C, JS, J…

I have a old article with lots of screenshots, http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compile...

Pretty amazing. I wish I could do my work on a truly lightweight system like this.

Re: Project Oberon

#42

Post by kragen »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
kragen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be delighted if you'd correct whatever isn't!

Go is mix of Limbo and Oberon-2. I also remember reading somewhere that Wirth found Cedar too powerful, or complex, so Oberon was designed with the goal to be as capable as Cedar environment, while using a simpler language. So not sure which kind of relation I would put them, besides being an inspiration.

Thank you!

What are the Oberon-2 features in Golang that aren't in Limbo?

I should have clarified the Squeak → Newsqueak → Alef → Limbo → Golang lineage, but from my point of view Newsqueak is already recognizably a version of Golang (and Squeak isn't.)

Re: Project Oberon

#44

Post by rbanffy »

johndoe0815 wrote: post #12
rbanffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it could be ported to the MiSTer platform. It seems to be a very common and friendly device.

This should be possible - Hellwig Geisse (forgot to mention his project, sorry - https://github.com/hgeisse/THM-Oberon ) is working on an Oberon port to the Terasic DE2-115 FPGA port, which has an Altera FPGA like the MiSTer. The basis of the MiSTer is a Terasic DE10 Nano FPGA board, which has a more recent Cyclone V FPGA (the DE2-115 has a Cyclone II). The MiST (MiSTer's predecessor, https://github.com/mist-devel )…

On a somewhat different vibe, the Lilith was a pretty interesting machine back then. These FPGA platforms get a lot of attention for retrogaming, but they'd be incredibly interesting for exploring extinct more "serious" hardware platforms.

Re: Project Oberon

#45

Post by elcapitan »

kragen wrote: post #28
pjmlp wrote: post #7

The Oberon channel has several videos of Oberon in action, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Oberon+Chan... While Oberon was quite cool, people should also learn about its Xerox influence, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Also dive into what happened afterwards, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Zonnon,... Active Oberon could be considered quite modern, also makes the d…

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

Totally OT, but I was wondering why you are writing years in 5 digits? :D

Re: Project Oberon

#46

Post by carapace »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #40
carapace wrote: post #19

Project Oberon is awesome! I found the Project Oberon book in SFSU library and read it cover to cover. Such a tight, elegant system. Pretty much complete: Oberon OS includes compiler for Oberon language! Language was self-hosted (compiler written in itself) and Prof. Wirth had a heuristic: no feature could be added to the lang/compiler if it made compiling the compiler slower. There are several emulators, in C, JS, J…

> The GUI system, especially with the "Gadgets" subsystem, is mind-blowing. It would take too long to go over it at the moment, but there are features there that still haven't made it into mainstream GUI systems. Have you seen Delphi?

Yes. Oberon with Gadgets was like having the capabilities of Delphi live in the GUI. You could literally select widgets and open an inspector tool and edit them. It also had a facility similar to OLE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding ) implemented with message passing.

When I said these features still haven't made it into mainstream GUI systems I didn't mean that they weren't represented at all. But Delphi is an app rather than a built-in part of the OS/GUI. OLE was in Windows, but it didn't really take off AFAIK. Smalltalk integrated GUIs (Pharo, Squeak, etc.) are very similar, albeit with a very different language and runtime architecture, but again, Smalltalk didn't break into widespread mainstream adoption.

Re: Project Oberon

#47

Post by elcapitan »

Rochus wrote: post #14

See also http://oberon-lang.ch or https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon for a modern version which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux including an IDE with source-level debugger.

Interesting, the cleaned up syntax reminds me a lot of Nim :)

Re: Project Oberon

#48

Post by Rochus »

elcapitan wrote: post #47
Rochus wrote: post #14

See also http://oberon-lang.ch or https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon for a modern version which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux including an IDE with source-level debugger.

Interesting, the cleaned up syntax reminds me a lot of Nim :)

Nim is a nice language, but more geared to Python. Oberon+ is based on the original Oberon syntax instead using the "end" keyword to end blocks (instead of indentation); but when using the lowercase keyword versions it has certain similarities with Lua, which is not that surprising since Lua - as Oberon - is influenced by Modula-2.

Re: Project Oberon

#49

Post by ______-_-______ »

7thaccount wrote: post #41
pjmlp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a old article with lots of screenshots, http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compile...

Pretty amazing. I wish I could do my work on a truly lightweight system like this.

Look at that install screen. Everything is listed in KB instead of GB. It's beautiful.

Re: Project Oberon

#50

Post by iso8859-1 »

elcapitan wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

Totally OT, but I was wondering why you are writing years in 5 digits? :D

https://longnow.org/
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