The Oberon book (by Wirth, updated in 2013) is excellent in that it describes the entire Oberon system, from the processor on up in a single volume.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf
Oberon (2009)
51–60 of 149 posts
Re: Oberon (2009)
#52This was going to be the next Pascal... back when Pascal was a thing. I do remember chatting with some Borland folks about how they would be supporting it (Turbo Oberon?), but they weren't really very enthusiastic about it. Of course, that was early 90s and they were still shipping floppies, so...
(edit: didn't remember the year, so left it as a range)
Re: Oberon (2009)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was there from 2006 to 2012. The OS course (I think that's third or fourth semester) was being taught with Active Oberon. Must have been in 2007 or 2008, so might have changed right after. Eiffel, Oberon, Event-B are just the most notable examples of things that we were being taught that have never become mainstream.
Yet those are the kind of things universities are great, one get to learn about technologies that changes one's point of view (ideally), something that self taught or professional schools hardly achieve.
I think that my ideal CS education would include 3 things:
1. "We're going to ask you to build real software, with real tools, in a group. Even if it's only for one course."
2. "We're going to ask you to do some theory and write some proofs."
3. "We're going to show you some wild stuff that looks like it belongs on an alternate timeline."
(3) might be something like Oberon, or Racket, or some eccentric faculty project. Or even just teaching all your CS majors Haskell, if you don't have any genuinely eccentric faculty projects to inflict on students.
Innovation is often driven by people who are aware of what might have been.
Re: Oberon (2009)
#54This was going to be the next Pascal... back when Pascal was a thing. I do remember chatting with some Borland folks about how they would be supporting it (Turbo Oberon?), but they weren't really very enthusiastic about it. Of course, that was early 90s and they were still shipping floppies, so... (edit: didn't remember the year, so left it as a range)
You're missing one step here, as the "next Pascal" was Oberon's predecessor Modula-2. For which there were some 8/16-bit compilers around, including a Turbo Modula-2.
Didn't seem to work out back than for a few reasons, one probably simply being that "Pascal" had a certain name recognition. Also, OO was coming around which Modula-2 didn't have, and by the time Oberon was invented, Object Pacal was already a thing.
Re: Oberon (2009)
#55Not only have I heard of Oberon, I've written code for it! 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…
FYI, a flavor of Oberon will also fly to space soon it turns out... https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03404v1
> ...all memory accesses are indirect ... module-data is position independent and may be moved in case memory should fail due to radiation damage.
I once used a debugger that shipped with a rather snarky easter egg command: "find my bug". One of its more useful suggestions was "Maybe a cosmic ray error? Use smaller chips!".
Re: Oberon (2009)
#56The timeline does skip a bit too fast over Medos-2[1], the predecessor of the Lilith's operating system, using Modula-2. That plugs the gap between the Alto-Oberon timeline, with Oberon basically being both a continuation of that and a simplification of Smalltalk and the whole software environment in total (surprise: Wirth is not a fan of it [2][3]).
[1]: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...
[2]: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf (PDF)
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
[Edit: corrected reference to Ceres, which was the Lillith successor]
Re: Oberon (2009)
#57This was going to be the next Pascal... back when Pascal was a thing. I do remember chatting with some Borland folks about how they would be supporting it (Turbo Oberon?), but they weren't really very enthusiastic about it. Of course, that was early 90s and they were still shipping floppies, so... (edit: didn't remember the year, so left it as a range)
You're missing one step here, as the "next Pascal" was Oberon's predecessor Modula-2. For which there were some 8/16-bit compilers around, including a Turbo Modula-2 . Didn't seem to work out back than for a few reasons, one probably simply being that "Pascal" had a certain name recognition. Also, OO was coming around which Modula-2 didn't have, and by the time Oberon was invented, Object Pacal was already a thing.
I remember being impressed by Modula-3 back then. I wish it wasn't so difficult to compile the compiler.
Re: Oberon (2009)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet those are the kind of things universities are great, one get to learn about technologies that changes one's point of view (ideally), something that self taught or professional schools hardly achieve.
I think that my ideal CS education would include 3 things: 1. "We're going to ask you to build real software, with real tools, in a group. Even if it's only for one course." 2. "We're going to ask you to do some theory and write some proofs." 3. "We're going to show you some wild stuff that looks like it belongs on an alternate timeline." (3) might be something like Oberon, or Racket, or some eccentric faculty projec…
> Or even just teaching all your CS majors Haskell, if you don't have any genuinely eccentric faculty projects to inflict on students.
We got taught Eiffel Freshman year, C and Haskell Sophomore year, and after that, whenever a course used another language (Java, C#, C++), the prof just said "you'll pick it up".
(That's leaving out the usual-for-academia-but-still-weird stuff like MATLAB and Verilog)
Re: Oberon (2009)
#59The text-based UI reminds me of the Acme text editor from Plan 9 (it’s now also available for other OS so easy to try) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
Acme was inspired by Oberon, and Oberon was inspired by a system called Cedar[1] which was created at Xerox PARC. From "Acme, A User Interface for Programmers"[2] by Rob Pike: > Cedar was, however, the major inspiration for Oberon [Wirt89], a system of similar scope but much smaller scale. Through careful selection of Cedar’s ideas, Oberon shows that its lessons can be applied to a small, coherent system that can run…
Niklaus Wirth spent a sabbatical at PARC[0] in 1976, so the inspiration was direct (or at least via Mesa).
[0] in fact, he's said he built the FPGA Oberon[1] because his favourite mouse[2] was a departure gift from PARC, but of course, he can't buy any system today that would allow him to keep using it, so he built one. Now that's a yak shave.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606760
[2] I've seen a not-still-in-use wooden mouse from the Englebart days, but I believe Bucky's is plastic.
Re: Oberon (2009)
#60I installed the Oberon OS (A2) emulator and showed it to my friend. We burst out laughing at that program that makes a skeleton run across the screen. If you keep executing it, it just spawns more skeletons and we had a skeleton parade.