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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#71

Post by kragen »

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…

Your pocket phone is more powerful than any Xerox workstation, but you and I are less powerful than Wirth, so if we want systems we can understand and restructure at will, they probably need to be simpler than what Wirth could handle, not more complex.

Re: Project Oberon

#72

Post by Rochus »

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

Thanks for the reference; unfortunately we don't know who of the two authors has written the paragraph, and it is also not very specific. Meanwhile I found the following paragraph in Wirth's tutorial titled "Programming in Oberon" (of which a version can be downloaded from https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/PIO.pdf, and the first version of which apparently is from 2004); on page 57 we can read:

"The designers of Smalltalk clearly wished to present not only a new language, but also a new paradigm, a new approach to programming. To be effective and convincing in this endeavor, they provided also a new terminology to underscore a different quality of programming. In this effort, record-structured variables became objects, their associated procedures became methods, a data type became a class, and calling a procedure is now termed sending a message to an object. This is denoted as object.method(message)"

It is interesting to note that "object.method(message)" has nothing to do with Smalltalk syntax at all (which supports my assumption that he had little to no personal contact with it). In his 1988 papers Smalltalk is just referenced as one of many OO languages, next to Simula 67, ObjectPascal and C++.

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