Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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