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> Personally I prefer Oberon+ over original Oberon. I don't like that Oberon+ removed uppercase requirement for the keywords. While I too found the uppercase r

> Personally I prefer Oberon+ over original Oberon. I don't like that Oberon+ removed uppercase requirement for the keywords. While I too found the uppercase requirement to be weird initially, I have now come to appreciate the sentiment behind it - it does make it easy to read and review the Oberon code. Just like Python uses indentation to increase readability, the uppercase keywords were a good defining feature of the original Oberon, and shouldn't have been removed. After all, now that modern editors can automatically make the keywords uppercase, programmers don't really have any reason to complain about it. It's a simple usability trick that doesn't rely on colours or font size or weight to increase readability. (One can also argue that if you want to remove that as a language feature, why stop there - why not also remove BEGIN and END and replace that with brackets or something else?).

Rochus 4y ago
Upper case keywords are not removed. You can continue to use the old syntax, so the code looks like it came straight out of the sixties, see https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/15/examples-with-traditional-syntax.html https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/15/examples-with-tradi.... Each valid Oberon, Oberon-07 or Oberon-2 program is a valid Oberon+ program. The lexer checks whether module is written in upper or lower case and then switches the syntax. Only a few people still prefer the old syntax. What do you dislike about begin/end?
- webmobdev 4y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. It would also be helpful if the editor also included a setting to automatically capitalise the keywords and make the developer's job easier. And no, I don't dislike begin / end as they too improve readability (I was just pointing out that they are also a language design feature to increase readability). Modern editors though should anyway be offering to auto-complete it so that typing these doesn't become tedious.

Rochus 4y ago

Upper case keywords are not removed. You can continue to use the old syntax, so the code looks like it came straight out of the sixties, see https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/15/examples-with-traditional-syntax.html https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/15/examples-with-tradi.... Each valid Oberon, Oberon-07 or Oberon-2 program is a valid Oberon+ program. The lexer checks whether module is written in upper or lower case and then switches the syntax. Only a few people still prefer the old syntax. What do you dislike about begin/end?

webmobdev 4y ago
Thanks for the clarification. It would also be helpful if the editor also included a setting to automatically capitalise the keywords and make the developer's job easier. And no, I don't dislike begin / end as they too improve readability (I was just pointing out that they are also a language design feature to increase readability). Modern editors though should anyway be offering to auto-complete it so that typing these doesn't become tedious.