7 ms·
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
by wrycoder 5y ago
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 easily be called features of a dialect. However, there are a few that merit a stronger distinction, because they should be considered as permanent, and as corrections of unsatisfactory properties of the original Oberon. These are the elimination of the loop statement, function result specification, array assignments, constant parameters, and read- only import of variables. All changes were made in the interest of regularity, simplicity, completeness, and well-structuredness.
See also [3] for confirmation that Oberon-7 is the language of Project Oberon.
I'd recommend reading the papers on Wirth's personal site [2].
[0] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.pdf (pdf) (15Jul2011 update)
[1] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/OberonAtAGlance.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/OberonAtAGlance.pdf (pdf) (20Nov2013)
[2] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/index.html https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/index.html
[3] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf (pdf) (2013)
- pjmlp 5y agoProject 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 is more powerful than any Xerox workstation, why should we keep searching for such minimalist endeavours, instead of the rich development experience provided by them.
- badsectoracula 5y ago> While I admire Wirth's work, his goal to pursue a minimalist Oberon with Oberon-07 is not so interesting to me. While it may not be interesting to you, it is what the linked project is all about.
- kragen 5y agoYour 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.