I'm currently reading Mössenböck's introduction to OOP (1992), and I'd say it's all pretty much by design. Refreshingly for that era, he doesn't recommend using

I'm currently reading Mössenböck's introduction to OOP (1992), and I'd say it's all pretty much by design. Refreshingly for that era, he doesn't recommend using OOP for everything, and he's aware of other language's features that C++ later embraced, like generics (Ada/Eiffel), but argues that they might not be necessary for what it aims at. And the latter is something we don't see as much these days, where people don't like "gaps", and compiled languages are measured by what they can't do (Go being one notable exception, it seems). For the Oberon system, Oberon was enough, and anything more would probably not have been worth it. Wirth and Mössenböck didn't really aim at meteorology super computers or whatever was the HPC rage in the late 80s/early 90s.