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Reading Niklaus Wirth, one can notice that despite some popularity of Pascal, he is not glad that Oberon (as a "polished" successor of Pascal and Modula) didn't get much popularity. I never did anything in Oberon, but reading the page Oberon For Pascal Developers I really did not like many of the changes as a Delphi/pascal developer, for example

  • forcing the reserved words to be always uppercase
  • making the language case-sensitive
  • getting rid of enumeration types

What do you think about Oberon, is it really "a better Pascal" from your point of view?

gnat
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Maksee
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2 Answers2

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Yes, I would call Oberon a better Pascal. With Oberon, Professor Wirth got to the core of object oriented programming with type extension and procedure variables. I find it elegant that Oberon is a smaller language than Pascal with much more power.

Oberon 2 took the language a step further by binding methods to records.

I do dislike the upper case reserved words. I find the syntax an improvement with the elimination of many begins and ends.

Oberon was used to write a very interesting operating system described in Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler.

Blake
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It is better, and worse, in various ways:

It is nice to have garbage collection, and facilities for modular and Object Oriented programming. It is a relatively small language; easy to parse, and implement.

The lack of enumerations is a pain (indeed, in the extended Oberon dialect we use, we added them back).

Relative to more modern languages, its minimalism is a bit brutal, and treating strings as arrays of characters in any language is ghastly.

Of course, Pascal has evolved quite a bit too, e.g. see Component Pascal.

grrussel
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