12 ms·

Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel [pdf]

83 points by urschrei 13y ago

This article presents selected facets of Project Oberon, the latter of [Pascal creator Niklaus] Wirth’s two large system-level design efforts. The leitmotiv of this project was a quote from Einstein, “make it as simple as possible, but not simpler”. And if any further evidence was still needed, Oberon provided the conclusive proof for Wirth’s mastery of The Art of Simplicity.

xtraclass 13y ago
Thx, very interesting!
xradionut 13y ago
I remember the the weeks I spent reading Wirth's book and learning about the OS and language. Would be nice if Oberon had become a competing system language to C, but it, the OS and the NS32K series of chips have faded into memories of us original alternative OS geeks.
- catenate 13y ago
  You might consider Limbo or Go as alternative system languages. Limbo is bundled with the Inferno VM OS, which provides Acme, which is roughly a text-only take on the Oberon UI. Go isn't the main systems language of any OS (yet), but is more recent than Limbo.
  - xradionut 13y ago
    Limbo/Inferno/Plan-9 look to be almost as dead as Modula and Oberon. :( Which is a shame, because the Imp of the Perverse programer in my dreams always wanted to do low level coding in some other language besides assembly, C or Forth...
    - gecko 13y ago
      If you just want to do low-level coding in a language other than those, the Free Pascal project (http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/) is very much alive, and very much none of the above. It's a nice, low-level language that also has a very nice, .NET-like object system if you want to reach for it. (In fact, the object system it has, modeled on Delphi's, was the inspiration for .NET's system.) (Note that both the Free Pascal project and its sister project, Lazarus, have horrid websites that are not reflective of the activity or quality of either product. In fact, the top post on the Lazarus website right now is about how they need to fix the website.)
      - Roboprog 13y ago
        It's a shame Google could not have used FreePascal as the basis for Go, instead of thinking that C-like structure had to be forced into the syntax somehow "because it's familiar", even though Go clearly wants to be an extension of Modula, and often must break away from C practices that just don't work.
        nimrody 13y ago
        Given that the language was created by ex-Bell-Labs researchers (Ken Thompson, Robe Pike, Russ Cox and perhaps others), it is not surprising that the language was modeled after C. Overall the current popularity of C (in systems software) gives an advantage to any language with similar syntax and semantics.
        Roboprog 13y ago
        Yeah, they ganged up on the Swiss (U of Zurich) guy in the group, I guess (the guy that worked on the JIT at Sun who also worked on Go). God I wish K&R layout would just up and die already, at least in terms of having function headers that span multiple screen widths. Personally, I like having "end" keywords, and a bit more freedom in the layout. (mostly, I like to be able to write one formal parameter per line in a function heading, and to use "Whitesmiths" layout vs K&R) Go feels much more like Pascal semantically than it does like C. I wonder if there is any research to back up the decision to make Go look sorta, kinda, like C, or if it was all ego and/or inertia.
    - catenate 13y ago
      I assure you, its total lack of movement is due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk. Seriously, I use Inferno every day, but my job is building software, so I mostly use it to write shell scripts and execute shell commands. It interfaces well with its host (I can thread calls to host commands in Inferno-sh pipelines), and runs over top of Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. One advantage of using Limbo to play around with systems programming in Inferno is that since it's a VM, you can muck it up as much as you like without affecting your host. Also, with the clean, spare implementation, there's less cruft to learn to work with the OS (also the userland). To start, there's a few blogs and Google code projects on programming in Inferno, as well as a book. http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/books/inferno_programming_with_limbo/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/books/inferno_programming_with_... Limbo is also a good way to learn some of the ideas in Go, which also has modules, strong types, IPC over typed channels, automatic garbage collection, and simple abstract data types. (I'd love to see Inferno updated and re-implemented in Go.)
_pmf_ 13y ago
The same (or a very similar) article can be found in the really, really great book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", which is a collection of high quality, highly entertaining essays about hardware, software and general CS concepts.
smallegan 13y ago
If you are from Michigan like I am you probably thought this was about beer before clicking. http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/287/1094 http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/287/1094
nasmorn 13y ago
One of my former coworkers took a job as CIO and inherited a huge application written in Oberon. It is maintained by two brothers who charge exorbitant amounts but since talent is very thin on the ground and they did a good enough job there was not really anything anyone could do about it. I really hoped this would happen to me when I started with rails but the the whole WHOOPS video happened.
- BruceM 13y ago
  Any chance that huge application has to do with video processing or something similar?
guard-of-terra 13y ago
But is it really that good today when we have Ruby, Scala, Go, Clojure and stuff? What are selling points today? Or is it a purely historic thing?
- xradionut 13y ago
  Read the article or the Wirth's original book. Wirth and his colleage had some original ideas about programming languages, operating systems and user interfaces that were revolutionary for the day. They even built their own workstations from scratch to run them on.
gecko 13y ago
So, let's say I wanted to take a spin in Oberon today. Is that even still feasible, or is it just dead? I can't tell what I'd download to get started from the ETH Oberon page, nor do I have any idea what the library and development community would look like at this point.
- GeneralMaximus 13y ago
  There seem to be ISOs and VMWare images available here: http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads Note that I haven't tried this myself.
- xradionut 13y ago
  http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads I haven't tried running the system in a few years, so your mileage may vary.
- laumars 13y ago
  From what I've read, there's "Active Oberon", which I think compiles to .NET bytecode (I might be having a blond moment, but it wasn't clear from their site what the relationship between Active Oberon and .NET was). http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/oberon.net/ http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/oberon.net/ [edit] oops, that project has been dead for 10 years as well. Sorry about that
- andywilliams 13y ago
  Oberon used to be taught (possibly still is?) as a second language at Oxford (after Haskell). As far as I'm aware, the Oxford Oberon compiler is still alive and has versions available for all platforms. It is available here: http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Oxford_Oberon-2_compiler http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Oxford_Oberon-2_compiler
- keenerd 13y ago
  Check out Bluebottle OS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS
- 13y ago
TomMasz 13y ago
Pascal was the first "real" language I learned (BASIC doesn't count) with a compiler that ran on the IBM mainframe at work. From then it was an easy transition to a Pascal compiler from Motorola that produced code for the 68000. Tellingly, the Motorola compiler had a bunch of extensions that made programming a lot easier and mirrored the features Wirth introduced in Modula-2. In some ways, learning C was a step backwards, although in terms of my marketability it was absolutely necessary.
- gecko 13y ago
  The 68000 was a wonderful CPU, and the last one that I genuinely enjoyed writing assembler for. A sane number of registers, a very orthogonal instruction set, good performance, non-segmented RAM, and high-level. If we had to have a 1980s CISC chip be The One True ISA, I really wish that 68000, not x86, could've been it.
  - spitfire 13y ago
    Burroughs B5000. Stack based instruction set designed from scratch for programmers (and implementing high level languages). tagged architecture. Single cycle context switching. It was also a secure architecture directly on hardware, tasks couldn't even generate addresses to munge another tasks data if they wanted to. Wish someone would bring that back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
- Roboprog 13y ago
  Yes, yes, yes! C was a HUGE step backward. And also how I paid the rent in the 90s. ANSI C had the advantage of being portable, though. Even if C, and especially C++, tended to be somewhat deadly. Turbo Pascal was about 90% of the speed of C with 30 to 50% of the bugs. And yes, I could use pointers and pointer arithmetic in TP if I wanted to bypass array bounds checking, but I had the choice when I needed to do so. Memory management is a lot easier with Pascal functions (and I assume Module/Oberon) than C as well, since the caller allocates the return value. Alternately, you can pass (always non null) values by reference instead of having to use (maybe null) pointers.
lennel 13y ago
we were taught oberon at varsity. twas fun.
praptak 13y ago
The article feels incomplete, as are many articles that praise systems of the past. Why did Oberon become obsolete? I suspect we could learn a lot from an answer to this question.
- xradionut 13y ago
  My guess is that it was a non-US based, non-commercial project that was too ahead of it's time. Think of a Canon Cat on steroids crazy. By this time C had already "won" as the system programming language for large systems. Plus when my buddies and I were interested in it, there was no hardware in the States to run it on. It did get one of our number into the PC532 scene and I came up a semi-interesting idea to turn graphics chips into encryption engines based on the NS32GX32 instruction set.
- keenerd 13y ago
  That is simple. Oberon was a full-stack environment. Where full-stack means it typically provides OS-like and filesystem-like elements. Where as a mainstream language such as Python molds itself to the existing OSes, Oberon tries to take on the whole thing. These have a history of failing. Not because they are poor at some aspects of being an operating system. But because they force a programmer to give up all their tools. You can't typically use your favorite source control or text editor. (This is getting better as VM interoperability improves.) So Oberon shares the same fate as other full-stack languages like Smalltalk and Forth. (I'm sure you can think of a few.) Awesome at what they do, but never gains traction.
  - xradionut 13y ago
    Forth isn't suitable for large systems or large teams. And Smalltalk has a "image" problem.
    - keenerd 13y ago
      Bash is not suitable for large systems/teams. MySQL depends on image blobs. However both of these are wildly popular. They slot into existing systems, making them easy to pick up and use.
sb 13y ago
I tried Oberon once and have to say that it was way ahead of its time. Not only did the author (of the linked paper) invent one of the first JIT compiled systems, but also the ability to execute code with a mouse click (similar to Rob Pike's ACME editor) is---for a systems programming language---still not available today. There were several novel research ideas tried for the Oberon system. I remember there was some paper called "Active Text" that allowed putting videos into code comments. (Probably that could have been done in Smalltalk, too.) Finally, all of the books explaining details are heartily recommended. Wirth's compiler book (referred to at HN several times) is a classic easy-going introduction (the Oberon-0 grammar fits on only two pages IIRC! [1]), his algorithm book (also available for download, also referred to multiple times at HN) has some of the nicest descriptions that I did not find anywhere else (showing a divide-and-conquer approach to computing the median [near the Quicksort treatment]; plus polyphase sort, which might be useful again in data centers), and finally the Project Oberon book contains some unique treatment on system software that is not easily found anywhere else. For example, it contains the details on what's called PieceLinkText, which is the (at least AFAIK) best data structure to implement a text editor and it's operations. (Predating rope-strings by a fair amount of time, too.) edit: [1]: just checked my own copy; Oberon-0's grammar actually fits on one page, the full Oberon grammar fits on two pages! [2]: URLs: - Compiler book: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf - Algorithm book: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/AlgorithmE1/AD2012.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/AlgorithmE1/AD20... - Project Oberon: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pd...
magoghm 13y ago
The book "Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" http://www.amazon.com/Project-Oberon-Design-Operating-Compiler/dp/0201544288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366902572&sr=8-1&keywords=project+oberon http://www.amazon.com/Project-Oberon-Design-Operating-Compil... contains a detailed explanation of the design for the Oberon compiler and operating system. Not only it is well written with clear explanations, but it also includes the full source code for the compiler and operating system in less than 550 pages! I learned some interesting compiler techniques from reading that book.
rcfox 13y ago
I had to write a compiler for a subset of Oberon in second year. I wasn't terribly impressed with the language itself.
no_more_death 13y ago
Yeah, in high school in the early 00s I was a big Oberon fan. I had booted the system from diskette on my windows computer. I also had Blackbox and built some really basic things. Overall it was a huge amount of fun, and I have fond memories of the Object Inspector and connecting references together on forms and stuff. It was really Brett Victor's "tangled" before Brett Victor came along with these ideas. Actually, it was a lot like hypercard, based on what I've read of hypercard. LayLa was a cool layout system kind of like flexbox. They had a lot of cool applications. The flat filesystem was weird (no directories), but it was certainly simple. Over time it was so disappointing, though, that the system never went anywhere. My biggest takeaway was to not be such a programming language purist. Now I'm a javascript fan. It's not pure or perfect, but it's simple and it nails the important things. Plus for the foreseeable future it's the most widely supported computer language in existence. Simplicity and pragmatism are really key.
MaysonL 13y ago
For an open source version of Oberon which will run on Windows, and with Darwine on OS X, see http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html
gl 13y ago
Oberon/F was used as a teaching language during my first semesters of CS. At the suggestion of Sun's marketing department, Oberon and it's accompanying textbook were replaced by Java™ 1.0. For me that's what happened to programming in Oberon. Fortunately, Blackbox is very well documented and even without a command of its language you can still appreciate many of the elegant gems it Guards just by reading Blackbox in Blackbox . I really enjoyed the article especially learning the bit about how Wirth measured a compiler's quality.

83 points by urschrei 13y ago

xtraclass 13y ago

Thx, very interesting!

xradionut 13y ago

I remember the the weeks I spent reading Wirth's book and learning about the OS and language. Would be nice if Oberon had become a competing system language to C, but it, the OS and the NS32K series of chips have faded into memories of us original alternative OS geeks.

catenate 13y ago
You might consider Limbo or Go as alternative system languages. Limbo is bundled with the Inferno VM OS, which provides Acme, which is roughly a text-only take on the Oberon UI. Go isn't the main systems language of any OS (yet), but is more recent than Limbo.
- xradionut 13y ago
  Limbo/Inferno/Plan-9 look to be almost as dead as Modula and Oberon. :( Which is a shame, because the Imp of the Perverse programer in my dreams always wanted to do low level coding in some other language besides assembly, C or Forth...
  - gecko 13y ago
    If you just want to do low-level coding in a language other than those, the Free Pascal project (http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/) is very much alive, and very much none of the above. It's a nice, low-level language that also has a very nice, .NET-like object system if you want to reach for it. (In fact, the object system it has, modeled on Delphi's, was the inspiration for .NET's system.) (Note that both the Free Pascal project and its sister project, Lazarus, have horrid websites that are not reflective of the activity or quality of either product. In fact, the top post on the Lazarus website right now is about how they need to fix the website.)
    - Roboprog 13y ago
      It's a shame Google could not have used FreePascal as the basis for Go, instead of thinking that C-like structure had to be forced into the syntax somehow "because it's familiar", even though Go clearly wants to be an extension of Modula, and often must break away from C practices that just don't work.
      - nimrody 13y ago
        Given that the language was created by ex-Bell-Labs researchers (Ken Thompson, Robe Pike, Russ Cox and perhaps others), it is not surprising that the language was modeled after C. Overall the current popularity of C (in systems software) gives an advantage to any language with similar syntax and semantics.
        Roboprog 13y ago
        Yeah, they ganged up on the Swiss (U of Zurich) guy in the group, I guess (the guy that worked on the JIT at Sun who also worked on Go). God I wish K&R layout would just up and die already, at least in terms of having function headers that span multiple screen widths. Personally, I like having "end" keywords, and a bit more freedom in the layout. (mostly, I like to be able to write one formal parameter per line in a function heading, and to use "Whitesmiths" layout vs K&R) Go feels much more like Pascal semantically than it does like C. I wonder if there is any research to back up the decision to make Go look sorta, kinda, like C, or if it was all ego and/or inertia.
  - catenate 13y ago
    I assure you, its total lack of movement is due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk. Seriously, I use Inferno every day, but my job is building software, so I mostly use it to write shell scripts and execute shell commands. It interfaces well with its host (I can thread calls to host commands in Inferno-sh pipelines), and runs over top of Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. One advantage of using Limbo to play around with systems programming in Inferno is that since it's a VM, you can muck it up as much as you like without affecting your host. Also, with the clean, spare implementation, there's less cruft to learn to work with the OS (also the userland). To start, there's a few blogs and Google code projects on programming in Inferno, as well as a book. http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/books/inferno_programming_with_limbo/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/books/inferno_programming_with_... Limbo is also a good way to learn some of the ideas in Go, which also has modules, strong types, IPC over typed channels, automatic garbage collection, and simple abstract data types. (I'd love to see Inferno updated and re-implemented in Go.)

_pmf_ 13y ago

The same (or a very similar) article can be found in the really, really great book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", which is a collection of high quality, highly entertaining essays about hardware, software and general CS concepts.

smallegan 13y ago

If you are from Michigan like I am you probably thought this was about beer before clicking. http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/287/1094 http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/287/1094

nasmorn 13y ago

One of my former coworkers took a job as CIO and inherited a huge application written in Oberon. It is maintained by two brothers who charge exorbitant amounts but since talent is very thin on the ground and they did a good enough job there was not really anything anyone could do about it. I really hoped this would happen to me when I started with rails but the the whole WHOOPS video happened.

BruceM 13y ago
Any chance that huge application has to do with video processing or something similar?

guard-of-terra 13y ago

But is it really that good today when we have Ruby, Scala, Go, Clojure and stuff? What are selling points today? Or is it a purely historic thing?

xradionut 13y ago
Read the article or the Wirth's original book. Wirth and his colleage had some original ideas about programming languages, operating systems and user interfaces that were revolutionary for the day. They even built their own workstations from scratch to run them on.

gecko 13y ago

So, let's say I wanted to take a spin in Oberon today. Is that even still feasible, or is it just dead? I can't tell what I'd download to get started from the ETH Oberon page, nor do I have any idea what the library and development community would look like at this point.

GeneralMaximus 13y ago
There seem to be ISOs and VMWare images available here: http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads Note that I haven't tried this myself.
xradionut 13y ago
http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads I haven't tried running the system in a few years, so your mileage may vary.
laumars 13y ago
From what I've read, there's "Active Oberon", which I think compiles to .NET bytecode (I might be having a blond moment, but it wasn't clear from their site what the relationship between Active Oberon and .NET was). http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/oberon.net/ http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/oberon.net/ [edit] oops, that project has been dead for 10 years as well. Sorry about that
andywilliams 13y ago
Oberon used to be taught (possibly still is?) as a second language at Oxford (after Haskell). As far as I'm aware, the Oxford Oberon compiler is still alive and has versions available for all platforms. It is available here: http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Oxford_Oberon-2_compiler http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Oxford_Oberon-2_compiler
keenerd 13y ago
Check out Bluebottle OS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS
13y ago

TomMasz 13y ago

Pascal was the first "real" language I learned (BASIC doesn't count) with a compiler that ran on the IBM mainframe at work. From then it was an easy transition to a Pascal compiler from Motorola that produced code for the 68000. Tellingly, the Motorola compiler had a bunch of extensions that made programming a lot easier and mirrored the features Wirth introduced in Modula-2. In some ways, learning C was a step backwards, although in terms of my marketability it was absolutely necessary.

gecko 13y ago
The 68000 was a wonderful CPU, and the last one that I genuinely enjoyed writing assembler for. A sane number of registers, a very orthogonal instruction set, good performance, non-segmented RAM, and high-level. If we had to have a 1980s CISC chip be The One True ISA, I really wish that 68000, not x86, could've been it.
- spitfire 13y ago
  Burroughs B5000. Stack based instruction set designed from scratch for programmers (and implementing high level languages). tagged architecture. Single cycle context switching. It was also a secure architecture directly on hardware, tasks couldn't even generate addresses to munge another tasks data if they wanted to. Wish someone would bring that back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
Roboprog 13y ago
Yes, yes, yes! C was a HUGE step backward. And also how I paid the rent in the 90s. ANSI C had the advantage of being portable, though. Even if C, and especially C++, tended to be somewhat deadly. Turbo Pascal was about 90% of the speed of C with 30 to 50% of the bugs. And yes, I could use pointers and pointer arithmetic in TP if I wanted to bypass array bounds checking, but I had the choice when I needed to do so. Memory management is a lot easier with Pascal functions (and I assume Module/Oberon) than C as well, since the caller allocates the return value. Alternately, you can pass (always non null) values by reference instead of having to use (maybe null) pointers.

lennel 13y ago

we were taught oberon at varsity. twas fun.

praptak 13y ago

The article feels incomplete, as are many articles that praise systems of the past. Why did Oberon become obsolete? I suspect we could learn a lot from an answer to this question.

xradionut 13y ago
My guess is that it was a non-US based, non-commercial project that was too ahead of it's time. Think of a Canon Cat on steroids crazy. By this time C had already "won" as the system programming language for large systems. Plus when my buddies and I were interested in it, there was no hardware in the States to run it on. It did get one of our number into the PC532 scene and I came up a semi-interesting idea to turn graphics chips into encryption engines based on the NS32GX32 instruction set.
keenerd 13y ago
That is simple. Oberon was a full-stack environment. Where full-stack means it typically provides OS-like and filesystem-like elements. Where as a mainstream language such as Python molds itself to the existing OSes, Oberon tries to take on the whole thing. These have a history of failing. Not because they are poor at some aspects of being an operating system. But because they force a programmer to give up all their tools. You can't typically use your favorite source control or text editor. (This is getting better as VM interoperability improves.) So Oberon shares the same fate as other full-stack languages like Smalltalk and Forth. (I'm sure you can think of a few.) Awesome at what they do, but never gains traction.
- xradionut 13y ago
  Forth isn't suitable for large systems or large teams. And Smalltalk has a "image" problem.
  - keenerd 13y ago
    Bash is not suitable for large systems/teams. MySQL depends on image blobs. However both of these are wildly popular. They slot into existing systems, making them easy to pick up and use.

sb 13y ago

I tried Oberon once and have to say that it was way ahead of its time. Not only did the author (of the linked paper) invent one of the first JIT compiled systems, but also the ability to execute code with a mouse click (similar to Rob Pike's ACME editor) is---for a systems programming language---still not available today. There were several novel research ideas tried for the Oberon system. I remember there was some paper called "Active Text" that allowed putting videos into code comments. (Probably that could have been done in Smalltalk, too.) Finally, all of the books explaining details are heartily recommended. Wirth's compiler book (referred to at HN several times) is a classic easy-going introduction (the Oberon-0 grammar fits on only two pages IIRC! [1]), his algorithm book (also available for download, also referred to multiple times at HN) has some of the nicest descriptions that I did not find anywhere else (showing a divide-and-conquer approach to computing the median [near the Quicksort treatment]; plus polyphase sort, which might be useful again in data centers), and finally the Project Oberon book contains some unique treatment on system software that is not easily found anywhere else. For example, it contains the details on what's called PieceLinkText, which is the (at least AFAIK) best data structure to implement a text editor and it's operations. (Predating rope-strings by a fair amount of time, too.) edit: [1]: just checked my own copy; Oberon-0's grammar actually fits on one page, the full Oberon grammar fits on two pages! [2]: URLs: - Compiler book: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf - Algorithm book: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/AlgorithmE1/AD2012.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/AlgorithmE1/AD20... - Project Oberon: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pd...

magoghm 13y ago

The book "Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" http://www.amazon.com/Project-Oberon-Design-Operating-Compiler/dp/0201544288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366902572&sr=8-1&keywords=project+oberon http://www.amazon.com/Project-Oberon-Design-Operating-Compil... contains a detailed explanation of the design for the Oberon compiler and operating system. Not only it is well written with clear explanations, but it also includes the full source code for the compiler and operating system in less than 550 pages! I learned some interesting compiler techniques from reading that book.

rcfox 13y ago

I had to write a compiler for a subset of Oberon in second year. I wasn't terribly impressed with the language itself.

no_more_death 13y ago

Yeah, in high school in the early 00s I was a big Oberon fan. I had booted the system from diskette on my windows computer. I also had Blackbox and built some really basic things. Overall it was a huge amount of fun, and I have fond memories of the Object Inspector and connecting references together on forms and stuff. It was really Brett Victor's "tangled" before Brett Victor came along with these ideas. Actually, it was a lot like hypercard, based on what I've read of hypercard. LayLa was a cool layout system kind of like flexbox. They had a lot of cool applications. The flat filesystem was weird (no directories), but it was certainly simple. Over time it was so disappointing, though, that the system never went anywhere. My biggest takeaway was to not be such a programming language purist. Now I'm a javascript fan. It's not pure or perfect, but it's simple and it nails the important things. Plus for the foreseeable future it's the most widely supported computer language in existence. Simplicity and pragmatism are really key.

MaysonL 13y ago

For an open source version of Oberon which will run on Windows, and with Darwine on OS X, see http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html

gl 13y ago

Oberon/F was used as a teaching language during my first semesters of CS. At the suggestion of Sun's marketing department, Oberon and it's accompanying textbook were replaced by Java™ 1.0. For me that's what happened to programming in Oberon. Fortunately, Blackbox is very well documented and even without a command of its language you can still appreciate many of the elegant gems it Guards just by reading Blackbox in Blackbox . I really enjoyed the article especially learning the bit about how Wirth measured a compiler's quality.