21–30 of 149 posts
I remember trying out an Oberon-07 compiler some years back. The speed at which it worked was impressive: it was able to build itself and the standard library modules in a small fraction of a second.
Starting with a very efficient compiler backend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pascal family languages parse quickly because they won't let you use anything before it's defined.
Probably a controversial opinion, but I absolutely wish this was more common. It's a thing in F# as well. With JS/TS projects I always ensure the ESLint rule for only using what's been declared before is enabled. I don't want to scroll up and down a file constantly when referring to previous things that might reference something at the bottom of the file, which then references something near the top, which then refer…
What the hell is this site's encoding? However I try to decode it, I get misdecoded 'ü'.
I guess they started buying computers from the US :-)
I wonder if any blind students, or other disabled people who need accessibility tools, had to confront the general lack of accessibility in simple, niche GUI systems such as this one. I suppose someone could have been given the assignment to extend Oberon with a screen reader or other accessibility tool, ideally without having to implement their own speech synthesizer first.
What the hell is this site's encoding? However I try to decode it, I get misdecoded 'ü'.
$ echo 'Zürich' | iconv -f latin1 -t utf-8
ZürichHad to learn at university :-)
The Oberon programming language is a nicer-than-average descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. The compiler was reasonably fast even in the 90s.
The UI was strange enough to feel really interesting. As the article mentions, you could type a command anywhere and click it. And the older version I used had tiling windows, although this seems to have changed.
But one especially neat feature is that the system was based around a rich-text format that you could extend! I wrote a little clock widget that I could instantiate anywhere, inside any rich text, and it would give me a live time readout.
In practice, Oberon already felt like a toy system when I used it, because it was missing tons of useful software. But as toy systems went, it was rich and original and well-worth a couple of weekends of exploring and coding.
If you enjoy the idea of operating systems that explored a different path, this is one of the more interesting ones. If you're fascinated by systems like the Lisp Machine, or SmallTalk, or OLPC, where the entire system is meant to be easily understandable and hackable, take a look.
> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. I wonder if any blind students, or other disabled people who need accessibility tools, had to confront the general lack of accessibility in simple, niche GUI systems such as this one. I suppose someone could have been given the assignment to extend Oberon with a screen reader or other accessibility tool, ideally withou…
> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. I wonder if any blind students, or other disabled people who need accessibility tools, had to confront the general lack of accessibility in simple, niche GUI systems such as this one. I suppose someone could have been given the assignment to extend Oberon with a screen reader or other accessibility tool, ideally withou…