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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#61

Post by ghshephard »

coldtea wrote: post #20
atomatica wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thanks for the concise summary. The only thing I didn't understand is the part about garbage collection. What does garbage collection mean and what is the benefit in this implementation?

Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said? In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection.

I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago.

Re: Project Oberon

#62

Post by [deleted] »

e12e wrote: post #39
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

Wow, this is excellent. The Oberon and Bluebottle OS materials have always been quite scattered, so someone putting them in a central index is quite convenient. For those unaware, Oberon's main qualities are the fact that it's a full operating system written in a garbage collected Pascal-like language (actually made by the same person who initially wrote Pascal) which uses said language's module system to provide reu…

> highly unconventional user interface that bridges the power of the CLI and the GUI together in this vaguely hypertext-like workspace where you can dynamically live program the UI itself through on-screen text that can serve as an entry point or continuation to perform all sorts of computations, things you'd normally write hacky scripts for. Closest analogue is Xerox's Cedar. Sounds a lot like Smalltalk's print-it/d…

[deleted]

Re: Project Oberon

#63

Post by rednab »

user543823 wrote: post #23
avodonosov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language: is it Oberon or Component Pascal (which was a descendant of Oberon)?

It is specifically Oberon-07[0], a 2007 revision of the original Oberon from 1986, which is still being worked on by Niklaus Wirth with updates as recently as this year. Component Pascal is a superset of Oberon-2, itself an extension of the original Oberon that tacked on limited OOP support and a handful of other tricks. Component Pascal was not a Wirth-designed set of extensions, however Blackbox Component Builder i…

> Unfortunately the availability of modern implementations for the Wirthian languages leaves something to be desired.

There is the Delphi-compatible, GPL-licenced Free Pascal¹). GNU Pascal²) is also still around but might or might not meet your definition of 'modern implementation'.

¹) http://www.freepascal.org

²) http://www.gnu-pascal.de

Re: Project Oberon

#65

Post by pjmlp »

ghshephard wrote: post #61
coldtea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said? In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection. I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago…

Well reference counting is also GC in CS speak and back then most BASIC systems made use of it.

Also by the time Java was known, some of us already knew about Lisp, Smalltalk, Modula-3, Eiffel, Prolog, ML....

Re: Project Oberon

#66

Post by sklogic »

ghshephard wrote: post #61
coldtea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said? In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection. I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago…

Weird. How could you miss Lisp and Smalltalk in the early 90s?

Re: Project Oberon

#67

Post by ttflee »

nabla9 wrote: post #11

Oberon had so many good ideas. It's still worth studying. The problem in the 90's: provide executable content across the net for browsers. Java was supposed to provide the portable universal binary code you could load and execute everywhere, except that it did not have the necessary features and was too complicated. Then came Javascript but it was broken mess for long time and needs binary format. There was Juice bac…

I cannot wait to see the future in Birth and Death of JavaScript become true, except for the parts of nuclear war.

Re: Project Oberon

#68

Post by pjmlp »

Keyframe wrote: post #18

Oberon. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Once upon a time there was a great crossroad in the early 90's (when I was a kid and learning programming - keep in mind that perspective). BASIC was on its way out - we all knew it to some extent due to home computers renaissance, but it was evident it didn't have any staying power. So there were all these wonderful machines with different architectures, OS'…

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me.

Wirth was never good on capitalizing his work on the industry. Same thing happened to Modula-2 sadly.

On his ACM award article and a later article about lean software, he discusses how sadly he sees industry embracing complexity instead of quality.

http://www-oldurls.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Turin...

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware....

> Pascal guys were mostly PC or Atari guys, and C were mostly those with access to *NIX and Amigas.

A reason why I never cared about C, so basic when compared with Turbo Pascal 6.0, and eventually got to move into C++.

Also most of my friends with Amigas cared only about Assembly.

Re: Project Oberon

#69

Post by sklogic »

codezero wrote: post #13

This isn't the same, but if you're interested in looking at a compiler and OS mostly from scratch based on C check this out. It's pretty amazing. https://github.com/rswier/swieros It comes from the author of the c4 compiler. (Interpreter?)

Shameless plug: there is also mine kinda-C-based setup (but I also have a somewhat unfinished Oberon compiler too): https://github.com/combinatorylogic/soc

Re: Project Oberon

#70

Post by w23j »

carapace wrote: post #32

Be sure to read "Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" generously published online as a pdf: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/ProjectOberon.pdf There are emulators for Wirth's new cpu in JS, Java, C, and Python. You can run it in the browser from here: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ (Shameless plug: https://github.com/PhoenixBureau/PythonOberon I wrote the Python emulator. I…

Correct me if I am wrong, but the page has links to the book you mention as well.

However, the your link says Edition 2005 while the pdfs linked to by the posted page say Revised Edition 2013.

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