3 ms·

FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

tomcam 4mo ago
Can't wait to try this on Mac (English manual install intstructions at https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf950cd8feb723d0080d0d4f4f4470c https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf9...). I feel like Oberon is very much worth a look for people interested in small, powerful languages.
- WillAdams 4mo ago
  The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.
  - eterps 4mo ago
    Oberon System 3 works on Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native
    - WillAdams 4mo ago
      That is new since the last time I looked into this. _Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?
      - Rochus 4mo ago
        > any plans to update for the 5? It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platform, which seem like the perfect fit for Oberon system, specifically the Olimex board with a HDMI socket.
        Sunspark 4mo ago
        ESP32 is a great SOC. Watch out for RAM issues though. I have an e-reader using an ESP32 that only has 180kb or so of usable RAM which makes things very difficult to work with. You will need to specify that it has to be the versions that have addressable RAM. Unless of course, all updates are entirely firmware and the limited memory is just to hold the text editor buffer.
        Rochus 4mo ago
        The Olimex board has 768KB RAM and 32MB PSRAM, more than enough. The original Ceres only had 2 MB of DRAM and 256 KB of VRAM.
agrijakhetarpal 4mo ago
[flagged]
lysace 4mo ago
The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in. Extremely poor taste.
- eschaton 4mo ago
  > Extremely poor taste. How so?
  - lysace 4mo ago
    That's bait. Go find your history school books. Byebye.
    - eschaton 4mo ago
      How about you just explain what you mean? You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
    - z0ltan 4mo ago
      [dead]
  - przemub 4mo ago
    Soviet imagery in countries that have been conquered by or subject to Soviet imperialism is seen extremely poorly. USSR loved its ethnic cleansing and purges, with several declared as genocide. Try, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD Soviet imagery has also been widely used by Russian propaganda in its current war against Ukraine, so it’s not only a historical matter.
SwellJoe 4mo ago
A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on. Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk. That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)
- lysace 4mo ago
  > Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body. You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did. https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-but-begin/ https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert) https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/ https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/
  - SwellJoe 4mo ago
    I did, but I prefer C. And, I prefer vim to an IDE.
    - rzzzt 4mo ago
      Prog8 maybe then? https://prog8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#code-example https://prog8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#cod...
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.
rurban 4mo ago
Wonder why they still haven't got their spark-like proof system from Ada. Would be more worth than playing with the graphics stuff, they added.
adalacelove 4mo ago
Tangentially related, but I hope will be appreciated by the nostalgic people here: Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article: https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.
sys42590 4mo ago
Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting. Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.
- Rochus 4mo ago
  > nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.
stuaxo 4mo ago
I think this type of IDE was one of my favourites over the years. There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.
pkphilip 4mo ago
For me the power of Object Pascal and Delphi was the ability to create reusable components that could be easily installed into the IDE. These components had powerful property sheets which could be used to set the values for their various properties etc. Lazarus does fill that gap but somehow doesn't quite have the same feeling as the original Delphi. The Free Oberon IDE looks like Turbo Pascal development enviroment from the late 80s and the early 90s. I wonder if it would have the concept of reusable components.
- thijsvandien 4mo ago
  What's unfortunate about those components is that they are in fact part of the dev environment. I really wish they were fully contained in the project and then dynamically loaded along with it. GetIt ever so slightly improved the situation, but still. At this point basically nothing else could get me to ever upgrade anymore. Lazarus doesn't do any better, but there at least you could vendor the entire IDE.

Can't wait to try this on Mac (English manual install intstructions at https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf950cd8feb723d0080d0d4f4f4470c https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf9...). I feel like Oberon is very much worth a look for people interested in small, powerful languages.

WillAdams 4mo ago
The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.
- eterps 4mo ago
  Oberon System 3 works on Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native
  - WillAdams 4mo ago
    That is new since the last time I looked into this. _Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?
    - Rochus 4mo ago
      > any plans to update for the 5? It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platform, which seem like the perfect fit for Oberon system, specifically the Olimex board with a HDMI socket.
      - Sunspark 4mo ago
        ESP32 is a great SOC. Watch out for RAM issues though. I have an e-reader using an ESP32 that only has 180kb or so of usable RAM which makes things very difficult to work with. You will need to specify that it has to be the versions that have addressable RAM. Unless of course, all updates are entirely firmware and the limited memory is just to hold the text editor buffer.
        Rochus 4mo ago
        The Olimex board has 768KB RAM and 32MB PSRAM, more than enough. The original Ceres only had 2 MB of DRAM and 256 KB of VRAM.

agrijakhetarpal 4mo ago

[flagged]

lysace 4mo ago

The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in. Extremely poor taste.

eschaton 4mo ago
> Extremely poor taste. How so?
- lysace 4mo ago
  That's bait. Go find your history school books. Byebye.
  - eschaton 4mo ago
    How about you just explain what you mean? You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - z0ltan 4mo ago
    [dead]
- przemub 4mo ago
  Soviet imagery in countries that have been conquered by or subject to Soviet imperialism is seen extremely poorly. USSR loved its ethnic cleansing and purges, with several declared as genocide. Try, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD Soviet imagery has also been widely used by Russian propaganda in its current war against Ukraine, so it’s not only a historical matter.

SwellJoe 4mo ago

A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on. Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk. That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)

lysace 4mo ago
> Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body. You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did. https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-but-begin/ https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert) https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/ https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/
- SwellJoe 4mo ago
  I did, but I prefer C. And, I prefer vim to an IDE.
  - rzzzt 4mo ago
    Prog8 maybe then? https://prog8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#code-example https://prog8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#cod...
Barrin92 4mo ago
My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.

rurban 4mo ago

Wonder why they still haven't got their spark-like proof system from Ada. Would be more worth than playing with the graphics stuff, they added.

adalacelove 4mo ago

Tangentially related, but I hope will be appreciated by the nostalgic people here: Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article: https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.

sys42590 4mo ago

Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting. Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.

Rochus 4mo ago
> nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.

stuaxo 4mo ago

I think this type of IDE was one of my favourites over the years. There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.

pkphilip 4mo ago

For me the power of Object Pascal and Delphi was the ability to create reusable components that could be easily installed into the IDE. These components had powerful property sheets which could be used to set the values for their various properties etc. Lazarus does fill that gap but somehow doesn't quite have the same feeling as the original Delphi. The Free Oberon IDE looks like Turbo Pascal development enviroment from the late 80s and the early 90s. I wonder if it would have the concept of reusable components.

thijsvandien 4mo ago
What's unfortunate about those components is that they are in fact part of the dev environment. I really wish they were fully contained in the project and then dynamically loaded along with it. GetIt ever so slightly improved the situation, but still. At this point basically nothing else could get me to ever upgrade anymore. Lazarus doesn't do any better, but there at least you could vendor the entire IDE.