Talk:Oberon (programming language): Difference between revisions

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==Problems with the current aricle -- long list==

I don't have the information to correct this, but

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"It also offers an interesting feature which is only recently becoming available in more prominent development systems: exportability of procedures. Imagine that for some program you create a PNG viewer procedure and that you export it: any program on the system will be able to view PNG files merely by calling the viewer! That's true reusability."

is bogus. Code libraries predate Fortran, and shared libraries date back to or before MTS and the late 1960s. [[CORBA]] and things like it do this too. I'm sure there's something mildly unique, but I don't know exactly what it is. Likewise,

: The original remark must have related to Oberon as an operating system, not to Oberon as a programming language on a foreign OS. In the former case, the function is just loaded into memory once and it could have been used in another program, but also from the command line. AFAIK this was and still is unique. [[User:Jan272|Jan272]] ([[User talk:Jan272|talk]]) 06:12, 4 August 2011 (UTC) Jan Verhoeven

Likewise,

"The code will be both smaller than that in nearly all other programming languages..."

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C programmers might point out that strict data typing like Oberon has is a pain and can add to a lot of type changing, from integer to float, for example, and even worse if you want to start bitwiddling character input. An Ada programmer, like me, would point out that in exchange for that pain, you catch a lot of errors; but Oberon doesn't catch nearly as many errors as it can, and is less portable than it should be, because it doesn't include enumerations and ranges that catch errors and avoid depending on an implementation specific integer type.

: That is more since Ada is more like Modula-2 (Oberon's predecessor) so only the successor to Ada should be compared to Oberon. [[User:Jan272|Jan272]] ([[User talk:Jan272|talk]]) 06:12, 4 August 2011 (UTC) Jan Verhoeven

This presents Oberon as the perfect language, and doesn't include any concept that it's not, that the design principles may have tradeoffs. This is not unique: [[Ada programming language]] doesn't include much discussion about the tradeoffs either, but mentions the features as facts, instead of saying how much better it is than "almost every other language". (comment by user:Prosfilaes, May 2004)

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A recent edit by Taw included an edit summary noting the article said oberon was not object oriented. As this can be achieved in various ways, including that used by Wirth et al in the design of Oberon, I suggest that this edit is confused as to the underlying facts. And in any case, the article also says plainly the O is object oriented, just not in the C++, Java, or Smalltalk fashion. Comments? [[User:Ww|ww]] 05:22, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

:I would say that while Oberon supports the practice of OOP, it also supports Imperative programming. It's a component-orientated language, which gives a lot more expressive freedom to the programmer. If I may go all poetical for a moment, the Copernican revolution in programming was the sudden awareness that algorithms should revolve around data and not data around algorithms - an allusion to the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. But as modern thinkers we should be aware that in fact the sun and the earth revolve around their common centre of gravity, which turns out to be outside the surface of the sun. Likewise, you can't write a decent large software system without understanding BOTH the data and the algorithms. This is an archetypical Niklaus Wirth view - refer to his ancient book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" (Wirth, 1975, {{ISBN |0-13-022418-9}}). Let us be glad that Oberon is not ONLY an OOP. [[User:OrangUtanUK|OrangUtanUK]] 19:02, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

::Oberon-1 wasn't even the slightiest bit object-oriented. In Oberon-2 there's no message passing, not everything is an object (in particular classes are not objects), polymorphism is limited to class hierarchies, and there's no object-based encapsulation. What it really supports is [[abstract data types]] and [[component-oriented]] programming (it is pretty much irrelevant whether it's "better" than oop, it's just not oop). It supports a little OOP, but to call it is too much to call it an "object-oriented programming language". [[User:Taw|Taw]] 17:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

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I've logged a move request to rename Oberon-1 back to Oberon (programming language). This is consistent with other Wikipedia entries for languages that have ambiguous general-usage equivalents (e.g. Lisp). It also helps to distinguish Oberon the programming language from Oberon the operating system. [[User:Chris Burrows|Chris Burrows]] ([[User talk:Chris Burrows|talk]]) 02:14, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

== Origin of Oberon ==

Is it really named after the moon, and not the moon's namesake, the King of Elves?

[[Special:Contributions/88.159.72.252|88.159.72.252]] ([[User talk:88.159.72.252|talk]]) 12:23, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Both. See Page 8 of the Project Oberon book listed in the references. The moons of Uranus and the "king of elfs" are both mentioned.[[User:Chris Burrows|Chris Burrows]] ([[User talk:Chris Burrows|talk]]) 00:11, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

: According to prof Wirth, the language is named after the moon. Period. All in all this is a rather silly discussion, started by someone who dislikes anything else than his (or her) own language. [[User:Jan272|Jan272]] ([[User talk:Jan272|talk]]) 06:17, 4 August 2011 (UTC) Jan Verhoeven

== Unanswered questions ==

After reading the article through I find myself lacking a lot of elementary information on the language. I don't know what term Oberon uses for functions (proc? function? subroutine?).

I don't know if it has record structures or something comparable. I don't know how its objects differ from those in C++, just that they differ. I don't know whether a language feature must be declared before use, as in Pascal. I don't know whether arrays of different sizes are considered different types, one of the most criticized features of Pascal, and which most other modern languages try to circumvent. I don't know if the language supports JAVA-style interfaces. I don't know what the entry point of the programming is -- a "main" routine as in C? Sample source code would help, but the only sample source code I've seen was on this Talk page, not in the main article. In short, this article needs a lot of work. [[User:CharlesTheBold|CharlesTheBold]] ([[User talk:CharlesTheBold|talk]]) 01:42, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Both procedures and functions that return a result are called procedures.

Oberon has record structures. Additionally, unlike Pascal and Modula-2 these are extensible and so variant records are no longer required.

Identifiers must be declared before use apart from pointer references.

Name-compatibility is used rather than structure-compatibility as in Pascal and Modula-2. However, the dimensionless 'ARRAY OF <type>' can be used to allow arrays of arbitrary size to be passed as procedure parameters.

Interfaces are not supported.

On a suitably capable operating system (e.g. the Oberon operating system) any parameterless exported procedure may be an entry point - programs are constrained to just one entry point.

Note that this is an encyclopedia article not a Language Reference. Refer to the external links for more in-depth information about the language.

[[User:Chris Burrows|Chris Burrows]] ([[User talk:Chris Burrows|talk]]) 11:50, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

==POV==

The article seems to me to have a POV problem. It sounds like a booster of the language wrote it.--[[Special:Contributions/76.169.116.244|76.169.116.244]] ([[User talk:76.169.116.244|talk]]) 03:13, 26 December 2014 (UTC)