Oberon-2

Oberon-2 is an extension of Oberon developed in 1992 by Hanspeter Mössenböck that adds stronger object-orientation and brings back a couple of features from Modula-2.

Note that with the exception of the Oberon compilers developed by Wirth himself that in general only support the original Oberon, most developers support both languages without explicitly mentioning it, this is because Oberon-2 is purely an addition to Oberon and therefore you can program in the earlier variation without any problems. But the literature supplied with the tools does frequently not differentiate correctly between the two.

Active Oberon is a variant of Oberon-2 that has explicit support for programming multi core processors.

Zonnon is a descendant of Active Oberon that adds safety features and a stronger object system.

Implementations

OS/2 implementations

• Canterbury Modula 2 & Oberon-2
• Gardens Point Oberon-2 was available in both Commercial and Open Source variants.
• HOPE - Internal OS2TOOLS release - but appears never to have seen the light of day.
• XDS-x86 Modula 2

DOS implementations

• Gardens Point Oberon-2 was available in both Commercial and Open Source variants.
• XDS-x86 Modula 2

Java

• Canterbury Oberon-2 for Java - Commercial
• JOB - Open source

Articles

• The Oakwood Guidelines for Oberon-2 Compiler Developers
• A Description of the Oberon-2 Language by Paul Floyd (Aug 1998)
• XDS Oberon by Paul Floyd (May 1999)

Publications

• Hanspeter Mössenböck: Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2
• Hanspeter Mössenböck: Extensibility in the Oberon system - Nordic Journal of Computing 1(1994), 77-93
• Hanspeter Mössenböck; Christof Steindl: The Oberon-2 Reflection Model and its Applications - 1999

Links

• Ryan Kelly: Getting Started with Oberon-2 - Tutorial