Where can I learn Oberon and What IDE can I use [closed]

Question

I'm really interessted in learning Oberon. I've heard it has a unique inheritance and polymorphism and hasd built in GUI (I love GUI!).

I would appreciate some links to some documentation (hopefully, simplish documentation) and an IDE/Compiler.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Oberon was a project that Niklaus Wirth (creator of Pascal) created on one of his sabbaticals about two decades ago. He has a page for it at his university.

There are actually two parts to "The Oberon System"; an Operating System and a compiled system's programming language. Somewhat confusingly, both are named Oberon.

The OS is interesting chiefly in that it doesn't allow overlapping windows in its windowing system. Thus no clipping need be supported. Working on such a system is kind of like working in Emacs with splitting buffers (but with graphics).

The language is very similar to Modula-2 (or a more useful Pascal, if you prefer).

The basic philosophy behind both was to keep things as simple as possible. The idea is that this allows the system to be implemented with a minimum of code, theoretically making it relatively small, and reliable. This lead to some interesting decisions. However, if you are chiefly interested in an OO Modula-2 or Pascal-esque language that is powerful enough to do serious work without going through a lot of contortions, you are probably better off looking into Ada.

Rather quickly there was developed an Oberon-2 language that improved things a bit in the utility department (made it OO, etc.). It still is essentially a feature subset of Ada though.

Answer 2

OBNC is a new compiler for the latest version (2016) of the original Oberon language by Niklaus Wirth. It has no GUI library yet but it is easy to interface to existing C libraries. Use it with your favorite IDE.

https://miasap.se/obnc/

Answer 3

There's a company in Switzerland called Oberon microsystems AG (website in German only, unfortunately :-( ) that does software development in Oberon.

Then there's the Oxford Oberon-2 compiler from the UK.

And a US company Excelsior is offering free XDS-x86 Modula-2/Oberon-2 development systems for Windows and Linux.

Plus the ETH in Zurich (where Niklaus Wirth used to research) has a Oberon for .NET project going - not sure what the latest status is. Check it out!

Other than that: Google's your friend! :-)