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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#61

Post by carapace »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
carapace wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

COM is everywhere on Windows, OLE is just a specific set of COM interfaces. After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts, they went on replicating the .NET designs for Longhorn in COM instead. So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM, and WinRT is basically a marketing name for COM 2.0.

Ah, I stand corrected. Cheers!

BTW your article you link to above is awesome!

Re: Project Oberon

#62

Post by kragen »

Rochus wrote: post #56
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…

> was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa Wirth was twice at PARC. In his HOPL3 paper he writes in section 4 "From Modula to Oberon": " As my sabbatical year at Xerox in 1976/77 had inspired me to design the personal workstation Lilith in conjunction with Modula-2, my second stay in 1984/85 provided the necessary inspiration and motivation for the language and operating system Oberon [29, 30].…

Thank you very much for the corrections! I haven't read HOPL3 yet, but he probably said similar things in the Oberon book and I just misremembered it.

Apologies for misleading readers!

Re: Project Oberon

#63

Post by kragen »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
kragen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The way methods are declared (Oberon-2 syntax), the unsafe package (SYSTEM in Oberon) and package initialisation blocks.

Thank you!

Re: Project Oberon

#64

Post by Rochus »

kragen wrote: post #62
Rochus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa Wirth was twice at PARC. In his HOPL3 paper he writes in section 4 "From Modula to Oberon": " As my sabbatical year at Xerox in 1976/77 had inspired me to design the personal workstation Lilith in conjunction with Modula-2, my second stay in 1984/85 provided the necessary inspiration and motivation for the language and operating system Oberon [29, 30].…

Thank you very much for the corrections! I haven't read HOPL3 yet, but he probably said similar things in the Oberon book and I just misremembered it. Apologies for misleading readers!

In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews; interestingly, Kay asked him a question at the Turing Price lecture and even introduced himself by name, and you didn't get the impression that Wirth knew him.

I also find it remarkable that while Wirth refers to the windows concept and Smalltalk in the HOPL paper, which was written as recently as 2005, Cedar does not use overlapping windows at all, but rather - like the Oberon system - a tiling window manager; the Oberon user interface looks very similar to Cedar and has little resemblance to the Smalltalk-80 user interface.

Re: Project Oberon

#65

Post by scroot »

Rochus wrote: post #64
kragen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much for the corrections! I haven't read HOPL3 yet, but he probably said similar things in the Oberon book and I just misremembered it. Apologies for misleading readers!

In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews; interestingly, Kay asked him a question at the Turing Price lecture and even introduced himself by name, and you didn't get the impression that Wirth knew him. I also find it remarkable that while Wirth refers to the windows conce…

> In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews

I'd be interested to know as well. It might be worth writing him a physical letter asking about it. There is a mailing address for his department at ETH here (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html) and I'm willing to bet they know how to forward him correspondence.

Re: Project Oberon

#66

Post by Rochus »

scroot wrote: post #65
Rochus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews; interestingly, Kay asked him a question at the Turing Price lecture and even introduced himself by name, and you didn't get the impression that Wirth knew him. I also find it remarkable that while Wirth refers to the windows conce…

> In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews I'd be interested to know as well. It might be worth writing him a physical letter asking about it. There is a mailing address for his department at ETH here ( https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html ) and I'm willing to bet…

His home address and phone number are even in the phonebook, but I don't consider myself or the subject important enough to bother him with it. But maybe someone else here has insider information. That said, there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that he either didn't know Smalltalk in the nineties or didn't think it was worth mentioning. After all, Xerox themselves did not use Smalltalk in their products either, and even at PARC the other teams tended to work with BCPL or Mesa rather than Smalltalk. I read an interview with Larry Tesler where he describes that for a demonstration of a Smalltalk application they had to fast forward the movie so that the menus would pop up fast enough. Not surprisingly, Tesler then brought Object Pascal to life at Apple in collaboration with Wirth, instead of using Smalltalk as he had in his previous job (even though Apple had a license - that was used nota bene later for Squeak).

Re: Project Oberon

#67

Post by badsectoracula »

pjmlp wrote: post #22
badsectoracula wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are Oberon too but my point is that they've evolved and added a ton of stuff that go further than the minimalistic nature of the linked site. The "Project Oberon" in the site doesn't even have overlapping windows or color for example.

That is like evaluating what MS-DOS was capable of by looking at MS-DOS 1.0 instead of 6.22. Oberon 1.0 isn't what was the daily driver at ETHZ, beyond its initial introduction.

The point of the linked project isn't to evaluate what the most advanced version of Oberon is but to show a minimalistic system built from the ground up in a way that can be entirely understood by a single person. It is mentioned at the top of the page.

Re: Project Oberon

#68

Post by badsectoracula »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
wrycoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider Active Oberon and AOS to be forks, and I think Wirth does, also. I believe that he feels that Project Oberon is his final word on the subject. Wirth created Oberon-7 largely by removing features[0]: Revised Oberon (Oberon-07) is a revision of the original language Oberon as defined in 1988/1990. It is accepted by the compiler recently completed for the ARM processor. Most changes in the language might easi…

Project Oberon cannot be his final word, given that it is only the first version, later upgraded up to System 3 version. It is hard to consider them forks, when they originated on the same department and he also collaborated in some form. Component Pascal and Zonnon, those are proper forks. While I admire Wirth's work, his goal to pursue a minimalist Oberon with Oberon-07 is not so interesting to me. My pocket phone…

> While I admire Wirth's work, his goal to pursue a minimalist Oberon with Oberon-07 is not so interesting to me.

While it may not be interesting to you, it is what the linked project is all about.

Re: Project Oberon

#69

Post by i_don_t_know »

Rochus wrote: post #64
kragen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much for the corrections! I haven't read HOPL3 yet, but he probably said similar things in the Oberon book and I just misremembered it. Apologies for misleading readers!

In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews; interestingly, Kay asked him a question at the Turing Price lecture and even introduced himself by name, and you didn't get the impression that Wirth knew him. I also find it remarkable that while Wirth refers to the windows conce…

There's a hint of what he thinks about Smalltalk in his book "Programming with Oberon" (co-authored with Martin Reiser). See sections 12.6.1 and, in particular, 12.6.2 (pages 236-239): https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf

Re: Project Oberon

#70

Post by kragen »

i_don_t_know wrote: post #69
Rochus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I'd be very interested to know what Wirth thinks about Smalltalk; I haven't read a statement from him about it anywhere, or heard anything from him about it in the many interviews; interestingly, Kay asked him a question at the Turing Price lecture and even introduced himself by name, and you didn't get the impression that Wirth knew him. I also find it remarkable that while Wirth refers to the windows conce…

There's a hint of what he thinks about Smalltalk in his book "Programming with Oberon" (co-authored with Martin Reiser). See sections 12.6.1 and, in particular, 12.6.2 (pages 236-239): https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf

§§12.6.1–2 are on pp. 253/338 to 256/338. Initially I went to the wrong pages. Definitely worth a read.

Interestingly his point (3) on p.219 (236/338) ("Within the text of a specific action procedure, a regional type guard is required to allow access to the state variables defined in the extension of the base type") was precisely Abadí and Cardelli's motivation for defining the ς-calculus. This limitation means that Oberon's type system is insufficient to statically guarantee the safety of object methods ("action procedures") and this is an obviously desirable thing. He mentions another similar limitation on the Oberon type system on p. 237 (254/338): "The fact that the compiler cannot check whether a message is ‘understood by the object’ may be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the type of the application."

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