Is anyone programming in Oberon?

Question

I am interested to know if anyone is currently (or indeed, previously) is programming in the language Oberon (or its variants, Oberon 1, Oberon 2, Oberon 2007, or any other language derived from and largely compatible with Oberon)

If so, what tools do you use? Do you have any self-written tools, or customisations such as syntax highlighting for editors?

What documentation (online or otherwise) do you consult?

For my part, here is a link to the most comprehensive Oberon bibliography I have found, including PDF versions of several textbooks on Oberon. Also, the web page of Professor Wirth contains PDFs of the Oberon report for Oberon 2 and Oberon 2007.

Answer 1

Yes & No. I used Blackbox Oberon under Windows for some time, and found it to be a excellent language with useful easy to use built in GUI , however at the time its SQL table display was not satisfactory, it was unable to control column widths, format, etc. so table displays were not pretty. ( this maybe still the case).

For documentation, I wrote my own ! A unfinished Blackbox specific manuscript is available at :

http://www.zinnamturm.eu/downloadsDH.htm#Dragoncity

I moved onto Linux and Wine could not run Blackbox, but it can now, ( 2008) , so I've been looking at it again.

The only quibble I have about Oberon generally is the UPPER CASE RESERVE WORDS :-), a feature of Wirth language design unfortunately.

Oberon Blackbox is free to download, but I think development has more or less stopped. This is not necessarily a problem as it was a quite reliable and mature product.

Answer 2

I was and remain incredibly impressed by the Oberon system, but when it comes to the Oberon language, I think Wirth removed too much. The fact that the system boots instantly and the compiler builds itself and everything else in almost no time is extremely impressive, but when Oberon came out I was writing a lot of Modula-3 and writing in Oberon just felt like a straitjacket. I also found that moving from separate interfaces to starred identifiers for export was a real mistake; not having separate interfaces makes it much harder to build a large system.

I know this doesn't answer the question, but people who like Oberon might want to check out Modula-3, another branch of the Wirth tree.

Answer 3

active oberon is great, try bluebottle os.

http://bluebottle.ethz.ch/download.html

Answer 4

Mike Spivey wrote a nice syntax highlighting spec file for gedit:

http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk

Answer 5

Oberon is a greate language.

Try XDS compiler (Modula-2 + Oberon-2) or

BlackBox Component Builder (Component Pascal -- refined Oberon-2).

BlackBox has good documentation and source codes (written in Component Pascal).

See Component Pascal Collection

Many beginers were interested in syntax highlighting, so you can find different implementations. But actually, upper case reserved words approuch make highlighting useless.

Answer 6

Yes, after a fashion. JADE is a RAD tool based on a variant of the Oberon language. It's fairly obscure internationally, but does have quite a bit of regional penetration and you can find it in use outside the Asia-Pacific region (the product is made in New Zealand). Architecturally, it's based on an Oberon (level 2 IIRC) compiler, an application framework and an OODBMS, although you can use 3rd party RDBMS systems through ODBC.

The system has an IDE and is made by a company called Cardinal, who were best known for their original 4GL product called LINC. The JADE system comes as an IDE and they make a server for the DBMS platform that runs on Windows, Linux and (IIRC) one or two species of Unix.

And yes, the underlying language is Oberon.