Project Oberon, 2013 Edition

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html

by jcr • 12 years ago

83 17 12 years ago

inf.ethz.ch

The Oberon/Modula-2 family happens to be among my favorite languages. It's one of the easier languages to implement and Amazon happens to have cheap Modula-2 compiler books. Wirth's own Compiler Construction book is free, though it's the definition of terse. I rather liked Julian R. Ullmann's Compiling in Modula-2 and John Elder's Compiler Construction.

There's still interesting work that is out there to rediscover involving the family. Luca Cardelli wrote a rather good paper on typechecking in Modula-2[1]. More recently there's projects like Modula-2 R10[2] in the works, which could prove to be a rather fun language to work with.

I thought University of Cambridge's track for teaching Standard ML to C via Modula-3[3] was a fantastic idea. (I also have a lot of love for SML.) By learning types and modules via SML or Modula first, it will ease understanding more advanced C concepts. C's weaker typing and implicit conversions make the value of types less clear and easier to ignore. I feel that C's headers and abstract data type construction are clunkier than they have to be and also devalue the idea of modules.

I would love to see renewed interest in Modula-2 in particular. The death of the commercial compiler industry has neglected it. It eschews garbage collection and I think it resembles a fixed C. For roughly ten years General Motors used it for embedded work.

Another excellent resource: http://oberon07.com/

[1] http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/BasicTypechecking.pdf [2]: https://bitbucket.org/trijezdci/m2r10/src [3]: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pr10/publications/plc93.pdf

ArtB• 12 years ago

For those looking for Wirth's book mentioned by the parent: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf

marktangotango• 12 years ago

What are your thoughts on the link between go and oberon? Go is an aweful lot like oberon, but with curly braces and a lot of syntactic sugar imo. I've never read anything about pike citing oberon, but the influence on plan 9 is clear, imo.

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

Go's method declaration syntax is based on Oberon-2.

And also how the packages work, is loosely based on how Oberon modules work.

Finally, unsafe has some resemblance with SYSTEM module.

dchest• 12 years ago

Yes, Rob Pike mentioned Oberon here: http://talks.golang.org/2014/hellogophers.slide#21 and it's also mentioned in Go FAQ http://golang.org/doc/faq#ancestors

username37202• 12 years ago

I think Lua is more related to the Oberon family than Go is. Lua's control constructs are reminiscent of Modula-2. What Lua has done with tables and modules is pretty elegant and I can see more of the highlights of the Oberon family in Lua than I do Go.

The few Oberon-like aspects I see in Go beyond the obvious ':=' operator are things like the 'range' keyword and methods. Both Oberon and Standard ML encourage composition a bit differently when it comes to functions and modules. You're lead to using more locally-defined functions in the context of writing a function. Modules are more at the forefront, with less hesitancy to define simple ones. Go I think more resembles an attempt to make a scripting language out of Plan 9's C and threading with a few odd-and-ends. I do very much like that it avoided objects.

However, I think even Modula-3 which appeared by the end of the late 80s already had things that Go right now is lacking. That said, I've used Go for some production projects. Some projects fit neatly into Go's standard library, which is the star of the language along with its ideas on tooling. The language itself I could take or leave.

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

When I learned C back in 1992, it felt primitive and clunky when compared to Turbo Pascal 6 (I used 3.0 and 5.5 before).

Unsafe and lacking all the OO and modular features from Turbo Pascal. I kept on using Turbo Pascal up to Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows and a little bit of of Delphi afterwards.

Wirth had me, systems programming with safe languages, I also got to learn about Modula-3 and was able to get hold of Native Oberon for PC.

My relationship with C was quickly replaced by C++, which allowed me to regain some of Pascal's type safety in a world that disdained Niklaus Wirth work and now is looking how to replace the security exploits C semantics brought upon us.

At least modern C++ eschews C programming practices.

e12e• 12 years ago

"Turning now to a practical aspect: The largest chapter of the 1992 edition of this book dealt with the compiler translating Oberon programs into code for the NS32032 processor. This processor is now neither available nor is its architecture recommendable. Instead of writing a new compiler for some other commercially available architecture, I decided to design my own in order to extend the desire for simplicity and regularity to the hardware. The ultimate benefit of this decision is not only that the software, but also the hardware of the Oberon System is described completely and rigorously. The processor is called RISC. The hardware modules are decribed exclusively in the language Verilog. The decision for a new processor was expedited by the possibility to implement it, that is, to make it concrete and available. This is due to the advent of programmable gate arrays (FPGA), allowing to turn a design into a real, functioning processor on a single chip. As a result, the described system can be realized using a low-cost development board. This board, Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, features a 1-MByte static memory, which easily accommodates the entire Oberon System, incuding its compiler."

rev• 12 years ago

http://projectoberon.com/ describes how to do it (that was the reason for me to buy Spartan 3 board). And that's how the finished project looks: http://www.schleibinger.com/bilder/oberon.jpg (thanks to Markus Greim for the photo).

magoghm• 12 years ago

I have the original edition of the book and I think it is one of the best books about software that I've ever read.

antigremlin• 12 years ago

I wonder if anyone ever considered bootstrapping Project Oberon on a Raspberry Pi module or some other open hardware system?..

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

Yes, the project seems stalled,

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/topic,726.0.html

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

I loved Oberon back in the day.

It showed me that a workstation OS done in a system programming language with GC is possible and provides a usable experience.

Sadly, the industry decided to look elsewhere.

leandrod• 12 years ago

Kind of ironical that the lousy layout & typography of the book gives away MS Word usage (confirmed by PDF metadata), and that the Risc emulator available at http://ProjectOberon.com/ is for MS Windows. Self defeating?

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

The original version was written in the Oberon environment.

This is the 2013 update and Oberon faded away.

Additionally if you follow ETHZ work, Oberon evolution is now Zonnon, a .NET language.

FullyFunctional• 12 years ago

1 second of Googling found me a cool Javascript emulator: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

Project Oberon, 2013 Edition

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