Oberon - The Oberlooked Jewel
ics.uci.edu
ics.uci.edu
How exactly improving the relevance of the returned results is not the best for their users?
> makes it slower
257 ms here. Not that much compared to the 2 seconds the actual server took to start returning the data.
> hides the true links
The proper URL is the green line under the title. Here it says "www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf".
If the URL is short enough that works fine, but if it's longer you can't copy the URL from there, because Google will insert an ellipsis in the middle of the long URL. For example, an article I was searching for just now shows up on the green line as ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/masters/mcl/content/.../Robinson-CL2000.pdf. Can't copy that, and can't get the original URL from the right-click either!
I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings.
So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably?
Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.
Should this post be flagged because it is a duplicate bypassing the dup detection by using a google SR link? Perhaps.
But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.
If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.
(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )
Dang - should have held onto those manuals.
http://stackoverflow.com/tags/clipper/topusers
It's not as popular as VB6 ;-)
Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.
- Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls).
- Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?
Common Lisp's loop is a macro, Smalltalk's are method calls (with blocks), work fine.
That's not the case in Pascal though. Neither `for` nor `while` are procedures, as in C they're special forms of the language.
It is sooo beautiful.
Why do you believe this to matter? Smalltalk's signaling and exception handling (both `catch` and `finally` equivalent) uses regular messages and blocks (with hooks into the interpreter obviously). What value do you see in making special syntax things which need not be so, ease of "optimizations" (such as compiling a block to a jump)?
Since Pascal lost, we gained buffer overflows exploits everywhere, thanks to a language that does not provide proper safer constructs coupled with bad developers everywhere.
Do you really need pointer arithmetic, null terminated strings and array downgrade to pointers for real work?
Because every other language in the planet is able to deliver real work without them. Even the ones that existed before C.
Skype was originally created in Delphi, before being ported to Qt.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/5/prweb8476410.htm
Pixel32 is done with FreePascal http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Studio_Pro
Atmel AVR-Microcontrollers programmed in Pascal http://www.e-lab.de/index_en.html http://www.mikroe.com/eng/categories/view/2/compilers/
Should I keep posting examples?
Or for you is Pascal only the very first release of the standard, which was only planned for education purposes?
Most of other examples are about a thin layer of Pascal on top of (unsafe and non kosher) C.
Of course you have to write on top of C, because that is what, sadly most operating systems are still written today.
But even that is slowly changing, when we look at the way operating system development is evolving, with safe layers on mini kernels, like Google is doing with Android or Microsoft with WP/WindowsRT/Singularity.
Anyway, I am stopping here, as won't convince you of anything and you won't convince me.
It is the living proof that it is possible to use a safe systems programming language for operating system development.
The Native Oberon system was quite nice to use in how the UI concepts would map to Oberon modules, as such it was quite extensible.
Sadly, it never got picked up by the industry.
The way methods are associated with types in Go has been influenced by Oberon language family (see Component Pascal).
I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms), instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.
The resources at the time available on the web certainly didn't reinforce my confidence in the choice and so I went to the C derivatives and never looked back. If there would have been better resources and better 'publicity' my choice might have been different.
But on the other hand, isn't he assuming that any future users of his compiler will have source code that looks like his? Sounds like all it would take is one person using an automatic code generator to generate Oberon code that's not smart about reusing variable names to bring the compiler to its knees...
So Michael Franz can hardly be considered impartial to this matter.