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FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

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Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#51

Post by Rochus »

sys42590 wrote: post #45

Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting. Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on…

> nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious

Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#52

Post by Rochus »

WillAdams wrote: post #48
eterps wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oberon System 3 works on Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native

That is new since the last time I looked into this. _Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?

> any plans to update for the 5?

It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platform, which seem like the perfect fit for Oberon system, specifically the Olimex board with a HDMI socket.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#53

Post by adrian_b »

pjmlp wrote: post #49
fuzztester wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways have they gone back to Pascal style?

Some things, that are not only Pascal, but languages influenced by it during the 1970-1980's. The most obvious one is type declaration order. Strong typing, with more explicit casts, to what C devs used to call straightjacket programming on BBS and Usenet discussions. Striving to go back to toolchains with fast compilation times. Being able to use high level concepts, while at the same time having the primitves for l…

Standard Pascal had some very serious design mistakes, which are less obvious for those who have used only extended variants, like Turbo Pascal or Extended Pascal, where some of the mistakes had been corrected.

Probably the greatest mistake was that arrays of different sizes were different types in Pascal. While C had extremely poor support for arrays in comparison with older languages like Fortran, PL/I or Algol 68, Pascal was even worse, because in Standard Pascal it was pretty much impossible to write a library implementing linear algebra algorithms.

Actually in Standard Pascal it was impossible to write any kind of library, because separate compilation was impossible.

Turbo Pascal was a decent programming language, but only because it had a lot of essential extensions over Standard Pascal, including the ability to write multi-file programs.

The languages designed by Wirth have become very well known, because he and others have written some very good books about them for beginners and they were used in teaching in many places, but all of his languages were quite bad in comparison with the languages that he wanted to replace, because he thought that they were too complex, e.g. Algol 68 and Xerox Mesa.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#55

Post by pjmlp »

adrian_b wrote: post #53
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things, that are not only Pascal, but languages influenced by it during the 1970-1980's. The most obvious one is type declaration order. Strong typing, with more explicit casts, to what C devs used to call straightjacket programming on BBS and Usenet discussions. Striving to go back to toolchains with fast compilation times. Being able to use high level concepts, while at the same time having the primitves for l…

Standard Pascal had some very serious design mistakes, which are less obvious for those who have used only extended variants, like Turbo Pascal or Extended Pascal, where some of the mistakes had been corrected. Probably the greatest mistake was that arrays of different sizes were different types in Pascal. While C had extremely poor support for arrays in comparison with older languages like Fortran, PL/I or Algol 68,…

Why bring Standard Pascal to the party?

It is always used as an example of how bad Pascal used to be.

Yet it always gets forgotten that only lousy UNIX compilers, or some 8 bit implementations, ever did nothing else.

It was created to learn programming, the Python of 1970's, quickly everyone else was using UCSD Pascal and various other extensions (which apparently are always cool when the language happens to be C), which were later standardised under Extended Pascal.

Although, yet again, GNU Pascal is probably the only UNIX compiler that supported it until FreePascal came to be.

Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 in 1978, thus still in the same decade as Pascal, exactly for systems programming and large scale software development.

Borland helped spread Apple's Object Pascal, designed with feedback from Niklaus Wirth, beyond Apple ecosystem, to what we foundly remember nowadays.

Yet Standard Pascal has to keep coming up all the time.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#56

Post by Sunspark »

Rochus wrote: post #52
WillAdams wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is new since the last time I looked into this. _Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?

> any plans to update for the 5? It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platfor…

ESP32 is a great SOC. Watch out for RAM issues though. I have an e-reader using an ESP32 that only has 180kb or so of usable RAM which makes things very difficult to work with. You will need to specify that it has to be the versions that have addressable RAM. Unless of course, all updates are entirely firmware and the limited memory is just to hold the text editor buffer.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#57

Post by _the_inflator »

wood_spirit wrote: post #25
SwellJoe wrote: post #14

A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on. Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that f…

For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that di…

Same here. Good old 386/486 days in the scene. (Turbo) Pascal was a thing back then in conjunction with inline assembler. C was not really a big deal. Visual C++ came many years later.

Even the legendary Triton relied on the combination of assembler and Pascal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triton_(demogroup)

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#58

Post by ogurechny »

przemub wrote: post #17
eschaton wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extremely poor taste. How so?

Soviet imagery in countries that have been conquered by or subject to Soviet imperialism is seen extremely poorly. USSR loved its ethnic cleansing and purges, with several declared as genocide. Try, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD Soviet imagery has also bee…

Some people use My Little Pony characters as avatars, some use history books characters and propaganda poster characters. It means nothing in itself, people rarely stick to what they preach.

If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#59

Post by Rochus »

Sunspark wrote: post #56
Rochus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any plans to update for the 5? It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platfor…

ESP32 is a great SOC. Watch out for RAM issues though. I have an e-reader using an ESP32 that only has 180kb or so of usable RAM which makes things very difficult to work with. You will need to specify that it has to be the versions that have addressable RAM. Unless of course, all updates are entirely firmware and the limited memory is just to hold the text editor buffer.

The Olimex board has 768KB RAM and 32MB PSRAM, more than enough. The original Ceres only had 2 MB of DRAM and 256 KB of VRAM.

Re: FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

#60

Post by thisislife2 »

throwaway7356 wrote: post #31
lysace wrote: post #4

The linked project web site ( https://free.oberon.org/en ) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in. Extremely poor taste.

They use Yandex for e-mail, so probably a Russian group behind this.

So what? Russians are good programmers.
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