Oberon

Oberon is a structured object oriented and procedural language in the Algol family that was introduced by Niklaus Wirth in 1988 alongside an operating system with the same name.

It was based on his earlier Modula 2 language but adds limited object-orientation but at the same time removes a lot of the M2 Language features in order to simplify the language and compiler.

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.

There are descendant languages that some classify as Oberon and others as members of the Oberon family, we include the few implementations that actually run under OS/2 in some form here just to simplify things, it is not a taxidermy issue. Active Oberon is a variant of Oberon-2 that has explicit support for programming multi core processors, Oberon/0 is a simplified version of the language intended to be used in teaching compiler construction, it is therefore as much a descendant of PL/0 (simplified Pascal) as of Oberon proper and you are not meant to download a copy, but rather make one yourself.

Oberon/L is now called Component Pascal is a variant designed specifically to allow development of software components, there is no native OS/2 implementation but a Java implementation exists and Blackbox Oberon runs fine under Odin, older versions actually work in WinOS/2 with Win32s installed, Blackbox Oberon used to be called Oberon/F BTW. Zonnon is a descendant of Active Oberon that adds safety features and a stronger object system. Oberon07 is simply a name for the latest version of the Oberon standard and does not differ too much from the original, the last update to the Oberon 07 standard was in the summer of 2014. Mona was a minor variation of Oberon that sported recursive data types, Mona author Martin Odersky went on to write Scala which sports recursive data types ...

WebL is an Oberon derivative that was specially designed to process web documents, people usually associate it with Modula-3 since some of the same people worked on both systems at the Digital/Compaq research labs and WebL was sometimes shipped with the M3 system, but the ideas behind and the basis for WebL came from the Oberon group at ETH although the actual implementation is in Java. HP later renamed WebL as the not very search engine friendly "Web Language" or "HP Web Language". WebL was mostly notable due to the fact that in its day (around the turn of the century) it managed to outperform similar commercial toolkits and was much more compact as well.

Implementations

OS/2 implementations

• Canterbury Modula 2 & Oberon-2 - Discontinued
• ETH Oberon System - Discontinued. Note that this is not just the compiler but the entire Oberon OS as a layer on top of OS/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 - Discontinued

Editor support

• Enhanced Editor - Has syntax highlighting and some formatting features available as a separate download.

DOS implementations

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

Win-OS/2 Implementations

• BlackBox Oberon - Current Oberon Core version does not work, older versions however do work with Win32s installed.
• Programmers Open Workbench - Aka POW!/16 - Open source - Discontinued

Java

• Canterbury Oberon-2 for Java - Commercial - Discontinued
• Gardens Point Component Pascal - Open source - Current
• JOB - Open source - Discontinued

JavaScript

• OberonScript - Can be run inside a web browser or by using the JavaScript Desktop Enabler.
• Microsoft Oberon Script - Older version of the above, code appears to have gone missing.

Articles

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

Links

• The MODulator - Modula-2 and Oberon articles from the gents behind the ModulaWare company in Switzerland, used to be a paper newsletter back in the day.
• Oberon2.ru - Massive Russian site dedicated to all things Wirthian, forum in particular strong.
• A copy of the old HP WebL/Web Language site - From Archive.org
• Component pascal resources
• Pascal for small machines - Pascal and Oberon related blog

Publications

• Oberon bibliography From ETH Switzerland.
• Niklaus Wirth: Programming in Oberon Updated version from 2004
• Niklaus Wirth: The Programming Language Oberon
• Jürg Gutknecht & Niklaus Wirth: Project Oberon; The Design of an Operating System and Compiler Updated version from 2005
• Jürg Gutknecht & Niklaus Wirth: Project Oberon; The Design of an Operating System and Compiler Updated version from 2013 (Not as well formatted as the earlier version)
• Hanspeter Mössenböck Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2
• Hanspeter Mössenböck Extensibility in the Oberon system
• Hanspeter Mössenböck & Christof Steindl: The Oberon-2 Reflection Model and its Applications
• Niklaus Wirth: From Modula to Oberon
• Niklaus Wirth: Modula-2 and Oberon - Historical overview
• Jürg Gutknecht & Mihael Franz: Oberon with Gadgets - A Simple Component Framework
• Jürg Gutknecht: Oberon, Gadgets and Some Archetypal Aspects of Persistent Objects
• J. Marais: Design and Implementation of a Component Architecture for Oberon ETH Zürich 1996.
• André Fischer & Hannes Marais:The Oberon Companion: A Guide to Using and Programming Oberon System 3 - 1997
• Günther Sawitzki: Extensible Statistical Software: On a Voyage to Oberon
• Archive of old Oberon Newsletter issues
• Oberon - An introduction to Oberon in Japanese.

Component Pascal

• Cuno Pfister & Clemens Szyperski: Why Objects Are Not Enough
• J. Marais: Extensible Software Systems in Oberon - Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Vol 5 (1996)
• Michael Franz: Toward an Execution Model for Component Software

WebL

• Hannes Marais: Compaq’s Web Language: A Programming Language for the Web - User manual.
• Thomas Kistler and Hannes Marais: WebL – A Programming Language for the Web - 1997
• Hannes Marais and Tom Rodeheffer: Automating the web with WebL - From Dr Dobb's Journal
• Quanfu Fan & Xiangto Wang: Web Languages and An Example: WebL
• Josef Templ: The Oberon Programming Language: The new Pascal - Introductionary article.
• Peter H. Fröhlich, Michael Franz: Stand-Alone Messages: A Step Towards Component-Oriented Programming Languages
• Michael Franz: [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/68c3/9912294de44359c1affeb5fcc8b71247dc32.pdf Emulating an Operating System

on Top of Another]

• Cuno Pfister: Brief comparison of Component Pascal and Java - CP is a component variation of Oberon BTW.

Mona

• Martin Odersky: Recursive data types and a report on the Mona notation of algorithms - 1989 PDF

Tutorial

• Ryan Kelly: Getting Started with Oberon-2 PDF

Standards

• Oberon 07 Language Report - Summer 2014 edition.