Oberon - The Oberlooked Jewel

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf

by pmarin • 14 years ago

54 57 14 years ago

ics.uci.edu

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Warning, direct link to PDF. And for some reason it is linked through Google. Direct link is http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf

pmarin2• 14 years ago

Thanks. It is strange, the only think I did was to use "Copy link as..." in the contextual menu.

_delirium4• 14 years ago

Yeah, Google has started adding redirect cruft to search results in the past year or so, which is pretty annoying when trying to share links.

huma• 14 years ago

It'd be nice to have a [PDF] tag in the link.

wazoox• 14 years ago

That's why I use the "Google/Yandex Search link Fix" Firefox extension.

aqrashik• 14 years ago

The original link seems to be a search result, which makes me wonder could this be used as some sort of SEO technique.

I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings.

So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably?

Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.

pmarin2• 14 years ago

You are right, It was a search result. I had problems with the link I found in the Wikipedia ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....) but not sure if simply I was filling the wrong entry box in the submit page.

kristianp• 14 years ago

I imagine google checks that search redirect links actually come from a search result (SR) page, for example by checking the referer.

Should this post be flagged because it is a duplicate bypassing the dup detection by using a google SR link? Perhaps.

_delirium4• 14 years ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875

pjmlp9• 14 years ago

Quite a nice system. I even wrote a lexer/parser for it back on my university days.

It is the living proof that it is possible to use a safe systems programming language for operating system development.

The Native Oberon system was quite nice to use in how the UI concepts would map to Oberon modules, as such it was quite extensible.

Sadly, it never got picked up by the industry.

The way methods are associated with types in Go has been influenced by Oberon language family (see Component Pascal).

zvrba2• 14 years ago

Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.)

But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.

JulianMorrison• 14 years ago

Try Ada? It's a Pascal family language, with support in GCC and a lot of rather nifty features.

adestefan2• 14 years ago

The gcc Ada support is actively developed and maintained by AdaCore. You can even get paid support if that's your thing.

markwong• 14 years ago

i love Ada and i think it is the real jewel.

pjmlp9• 14 years ago

Me too.

If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.

sehugg• 14 years ago

Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp

(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )

rbanffy6• 14 years ago

So is Clipper, but I don't consider it a good thing.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

In two decades as a professional programmer, I have only ever heard glowing remarks from Delphi developers about their environment. Certainly Eclipse and even Smalltalk can't match that.

guard-of-terra7• 14 years ago

I'm happy that Pascal lost:

- Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls).

- Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?

masklinn3• 14 years ago

> loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?

Common Lisp's loop is a macro, Smalltalk's are method calls (with blocks), work fine.

That's not the case in Pascal though. Neither `for` nor `while` are procedures, as in C they're special forms of the language.

pjmlp9• 14 years ago

Pascal heritage is Algol not C.

Since Pascal lost, we gained buffer overflows exploits everywhere, thanks to a language that does not provide proper safer constructs coupled with bad developers everywhere.

pmr_• 14 years ago

Oberon was the language used in my high-school courses (This was only 7 years ago). I had a hard time understanding the choice at the time and no one was able to explain it to me, but now it seems it was the logical decision when you try to move away from Pascal as a learning language.

The resources at the time available on the web certainly didn't reinforce my confidence in the choice and so I went to the C derivatives and never looked back. If there would have been better resources and better 'publicity' my choice might have been different.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

I remember playing around with Several different versions of Oberon on my Mac back in the day. It was intriguing but not really useful except for working on Oberon (fine for a comp sci course). The one lasting impact it had on me was that its system font was a really nice sans serif face called Syntax, which I continue to use for many purposes today.

X4• 14 years ago

For those who waited for "the language" by Nikolaus Wirth those may have a look into Zonnon http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y... [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075]

I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms), instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.

rbanffy6• 14 years ago

I'd love to have an FPGA-based Lilith to go along my also wanted Alto and Symbolics machines.

colomon• 14 years ago

Did anyone else find the story about switching from a tree structure to a list kind of weird? On the one hand, that's a pretty trivial sort of optimization, and hardly seems worth making a fuss about.

But on the other hand, isn't he assuming that any future users of his compiler will have source code that looks like his? Sounds like all it would take is one person using an automatic code generator to generate Oberon code that's not smart about reusing variable names to bring the compiler to its knees...

alexeiz• 14 years ago

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/ - "Franz received a Dr. sc. techn. degree in Computer Science (advisor: Niklaus Wirth) and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH degree, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich."

So Michael Franz can hardly be considered impartial to this matter.

Oberon - The Oberlooked Jewel

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