4 ms·
A few months ago, I considered Oberon as a viable alternative to C for my pet projects. Horace, after some time spent playing with it, I was scared by a fewseri
by ziotom78 10y ago
A few months ago, I considered Oberon as a viable alternative to C for my pet projects. Horace, after some time spent playing with it, I was scared by a fewserious limitations: (1) there is no support for UTF-8 strings, native strings are just sequences of ASCII characters, (2) lack of libraries and available bindings (e.g., SQLite, GSL, FFTW...), (3) scarcity of tools like package managers and Doxygen-like tools, (4) very few resources available on the web (Wirth's book is exceptional, but it does not cover use cases that are common in 2016.)
- jakub_h 10y agoI suspect that Oberon wants you to roll out your own text library. It's actually how C probably wants you to roll out your own string library, too, because "C strings" are no better than Oberon's text facilities. The problem is that nobody knows how you want to work with your strings. There doesn't seem to be "the one correct way" to work with texts. Gauche Scheme, for example, has an interesting take on strings (http://practical-scheme.net/docs/ILC2003.html http://practical-scheme.net/docs/ILC2003.html): backing arrays are shared and substrings are O(1), semantics for Scheme strings is observed - mutability is still possible but expensive, thus also gently discouraging the programmer from using it.
- pjmlp 10y agoOberon was great in the mid-90, but it is stuck in time. I loved the complete OS experience, but nowadays Swift, .NET Native,Rust among others would be better options.