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Comment by igitur | Hacker News Reader

Our first year university computer science course was all done in Oberon. Had to write a small parser et al. I absolutely hated the Oberon interface.

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It's a weird interface. Have you tried A2 Bluebottle? It's in that line but not as bad.

Regardless, I promote it for consistent, system design with safer language that's efficient, portable, compiles fast, and mostly GC'd. Good traits other systems should emulate even if not the extra-weird interface.

Note: One thing about the interface is how it was ahead of the curve on hyperlinks. You can click highlighted text to perform actions and move around in the system. Sound like something that became a ubiquitous interface? ;)

The Oberon interface that I loved was in Oberon microsystems's Oberon F/Component Pascal system, originally available on Mac OS and Windows. Unfortunately, they never brought it from classic Mac OS to OS X, only continuing the Windows development (and eventually abandoning further development of it [but they did open source it]).

Is that interface still preserved in the modern Blackbox on Windows? Found this great presentation on both it and all the concepts it uses for robustness:

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~skulski/Presentations/BB_Class...

I keep thinking I need to play with it as it looks to be a great tool. Like an engineer's version of Visual Basic 6 I started on. Super easy to use, fast, and code-generating for GUI's without huge issues of C development. The complexity chart was nice while showing good old ALGOL and Turbo Pascal 2.0 fit nicely in the middle. I think the Oberon's are too simple but Component Pascal seems better.

Add Design-by-Contract and some more safety features to give Eiffel + Ada some nice competition in robust, OOP space. :)

What I liked about Component Pascal was that it extended Oberon-2 to have an OOP model more close to Object Pascal as exposed by Turbo Pascal.

Also their designers were pushing for programming with components, instead of pure OOP. Basically a type safe way of doing COM.

The first edition of "Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming" used mostly Component Pascal examples.

http://www.amazon.com/Component-Software-Object-Oriented-Pro...

It sounds so good that I'd be ready to ditch the opportunity of Modula-2 revision for it if I was an OOP fan. I'm still not convinced it's necessary or even ideal for various tradeoffs. Besides, whether it is or isn't, Modula-2 might be worth reviving just as a C alternative for low-level stuff with more safety. I think investigations into and development of both simultaneously is justified.

You also have the Basic and Pascal compilers from Mikro Elektronika.

http://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/

http://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic/

That's great. I didn't know about them. So, that's Pascal, BASIC, and Oberon available for microcontrollers with Mikro in the lead. The other links look like they're a one stop shop. Increases odds that everything integrates well.

Blackbox is much the same, although I much preferred the Mac version. The language is basically Oberon-2, with a few refinements (final declaration and a few others IIRC).

I think the key take away is "had to"...

Mine too - ETH with Gutknecht? Can't emphasize enough how great the "interclick" mess was.

No, Stellenbosch University 1997. But, yes, maybe I'm just biased to keyboard use, but I never got the appeal of the zealous mouse interface.

For others, read more about the interclick at http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/ethoberon/tutorial/Mouse.html

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