OberonScript: a safe scripting language and runtime for web apps (2007)

http://www.ralphsommerer.com/obn.htm

by lproven • 6 years ago

45 33 6 years ago

ralphsommerer.com

NonEUCitizen• 6 years ago

"code of the compiler is available... for personal, non-commercial and non-governmental use."

MaxBarraclough7• 6 years ago

Rendering the project irrelevant at a stroke. A pity.

Does the language do anything that Dart doesn't?

protomyth• 6 years ago

Well, they did write an OS in Oberon. Not sure how much of the language is included in the Script.

2007 probably needs to be added to the title. I get the feeling that progress is a bit slower than anticipated.

dmitriid5• 6 years ago

It doesn't do anything most modern languages do.

Oberon is one of the confusing family of Oberons that come from a confusing family of Modulas that comes from Pascal. Most of them come from Niklaus Wirth or try to build on his ideas.

The reason I say confusing is that, for example, there's no one Oberon. There's Oberon, Oberon 2, Active Oberon etc [1]. They differ in things like

- they may or may not have things like for loops

- they may or may not have various OOP features

- they may or may not have pointers

- they may or may not have three different types of looping constructs with different constraints (you can exit a do loop, but not a while loop etc.)

and so on, depending on ... well depending on nothing but Wirth's ideas of what a programming language should be. There are at least two OSes built with Oberon: Oberon and Bluebottle.

There are fans of this family of languages, and I've even participated in discussions (on a Russian programming forum) where people would defend to the death the choice of three different loop constructs with different semantics (you can break inside LOOP, but not inside FOR or WHILE etc.), or the difference between procedure and function etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS

Rochus3• 6 years ago

Does the language do anything that Dart doesn't?

No. But Oberon demonstrates how one can implement real systems with a very little language; and with an extremely small footprint compared to Dart (you can fit a whole operating system into one or two megabytes). There are a lot of other differences; Oberon is a truly statically/strictly typed language wheras the type system in Dart is intentionally optional; you can write an Oberon parser in a couple of hours (in contrast to more complex and ambiguous languages like Dart or Go). Oberon was optimized for use as an educational language and was successfully used for this purpose e.g. at the ETH Zurich. Wirth wanted the minimum necessary for his language, without unnecessary luxury, which only increases the development and learning effort.

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

Mods please add (2007) to the title

dang• 6 years ago

Ok, done.

auxym• 6 years ago

For a more modern take, Nim has a type system inspired by the Pascal/Oberon/modula family, adds macros and other powerful metaprogramming features, has simple syntax inspired by Python, and can compile to JavaScript (in addition to C).

OberonScript: a safe scripting language and runtime for web apps (2007)

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