4 ms·

Some people rave about Oberon, and I think there are brilliant technical ideas in the system, and this is entirely subjective, but reading the language gives me

Some people rave about Oberon, and I think there are brilliant technical ideas in the system, and this is entirely subjective, but reading the language gives me a headache. At least Pascal allowed lower-case keywords. Does anyone know why Wirth never modernized his style? I wonder if there's a place for something that's equally minimalist, but more in line with current aesthetic sensibilities.

michaelsbradley 3y ago
Nim? https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10843#72291 https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10843#72291
thisislife2 3y ago
> Does anyone know why Wirth never modernized his style? Readability. It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. (I think Wirth once said that code is written once but read many times). See this source code - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3/master/Base64.Mod https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem... - to get an idea of this (the uppercase keywords allow you to easily scan the blocks of code). Ofcourse, one can claim that the same can be achieved better today with colour-coded keywords. If it really bothers you, I think the Oberon+ IDE - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - gives you an option to disable this and use lowercase keywords.
- codeflo 3y ago
  > It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. This is aesthetics, I won't claim that what I'm saying is more than a (perhaps popular) subjective opinion. But I will point out that at least the way I read programs, the KEYWORDS are the OPPOSITE of what I want to EMPHASIZE when reading code. I actually want the keywords to disappear so that my eyes can focus on the variable names and see the data flow. That, by the way, is also why punctuation to mark blocks { ... } is so much easier for me to visually parse than BEGIN ... END.
  - augustk 3y ago
    You could use a syntax highlighting theme where reserved words are gray for instance (if you want them to fade into the background).
abecedarius 3y ago
There's someone working on a more modern-style Oberon dialect called (iirc) Oberon+ or Oberon Plus. Can't remember much more, and the term seems hard to search for when there's some AMD chip with that name.

michaelsbradley 3y ago

Nim? https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10843#72291 https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10843#72291

thisislife2 3y ago

> Does anyone know why Wirth never modernized his style? Readability. It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. (I think Wirth once said that code is written once but read many times). See this source code - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3/master/Base64.Mod https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem... - to get an idea of this (the uppercase keywords allow you to easily scan the blocks of code). Ofcourse, one can claim that the same can be achieved better today with colour-coded keywords. If it really bothers you, I think the Oberon+ IDE - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - gives you an option to disable this and use lowercase keywords.

codeflo 3y ago
> It's easier to read the source code with uppercase keywords. This is aesthetics, I won't claim that what I'm saying is more than a (perhaps popular) subjective opinion. But I will point out that at least the way I read programs, the KEYWORDS are the OPPOSITE of what I want to EMPHASIZE when reading code. I actually want the keywords to disappear so that my eyes can focus on the variable names and see the data flow. That, by the way, is also why punctuation to mark blocks { ... } is so much easier for me to visually parse than BEGIN ... END.
- augustk 3y ago
  You could use a syntax highlighting theme where reserved words are gray for instance (if you want them to fade into the background).

abecedarius 3y ago

There's someone working on a more modern-style Oberon dialect called (iirc) Oberon+ or Oberon Plus. Can't remember much more, and the term seems hard to search for when there's some AMD chip with that name.