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Oberon

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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 Hr. 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 and addition to Oberon and therefore you can program in the earlier variation without any problems. But the literature 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 either Oberon or 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.

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.

A list of OS/2 implementations of Oberon

OS/2 text & programmers editors with Oberon support

A list of DOS implementations of Oberon

A list of Oberon implementations that run under WinOS/2

  • 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

A list of Oberon implementations that run under Java

A list of Oberon implementations in 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.

Links

Publications

WebL

Classic EDM/2 articles

Local articles

Tutorials and other learning material

  • POW Tutorial in German by Jörg Langenau, uses standard Oberon-2 syntax and is thus usable with other compilers.

Standards

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