Oberon Programming Language

Posted on: 2024-02-13

Note much of this discussion is actually about Oberon+ which does a reasonable job of improving the expressiveness, and removing some perhaps ugly aspects without overly complicating things.

Conclusion

Oberon is impressively readable and understandable.

Oberon+ does a good job of making a more "modern" language whilst keeping with the ethos of the original language.

Good

Concise and easy to understand
Read the original Oberon paper in less than an hour
Has set, string and array built in. No map though.
Oberon+ remains simple but as much cleaner to my eyes, and has some significant and important improvements with moderate to low extra complexity

Interesting

Use of generic modules
- This is perhaps akin to ada
- It's a bit odd though as requires an import specifying types, and then use
End can specify a name - such as the name of a module of a procedure
- This could perhaps be implemented via } of name; say
Has keywords that are seen as more readable in literature loop and repeat, are later removed
oberon+ has method call style where the this is passed in before the method name, making it explicit and special
Has the concept of a DEFAULT value for a type

Not sure

Use of caps keywords seems ugly (Oberon+ removes this)
Use of 'BEGIN' and 'END' I find clunky
The built in functions are distinct, by being upper case
- There are arguments for and against making intrinsics visible as such
Uses = for equality and := for assignment
Doesn't seem to have the name : type = value style that seemed inspired by Wirth
Perhaps somewhat verbose in type definitions such as POINTER TO. This uses more typical syntax in oberon+ with ^
Having 'OR' and '&' seems a little odd.
Uses EXIT for break
For a param VAR thats similar to inout or & in C++. Can use IN to get something like const
Has something somewhat akin to C pre preprocessor for conditional compilation

Bad

Ugly

Discussion

I've been seeing a lot of admiration for Wirth languages recently. I used Pascal back in 80s on pResearch Machines 480z. At the time it was impressive although I was more interested in z80 assembler as what I really wanted to do was develop games.

Much later at university I came across C I never looked back.

In 2024 the nice thing about the Wirth languages is simplicity and readability of the languages.