[Oberon] Re. Install your own OS

[jan verhoeven]

Op Friday 07 October 2005 22:12 schreef John Drake:

 > There in an Oberon V4 for Linux maintained at Sourceforge.
 >
 > 	http://sourceforge.net/projects/oberon

I don't particularly like that flavor of Oberon for Linux. I used it and 
erased it after a quite short time. I now use 'ETH Oberon (2.4) for Linux 
x86' which is much better for me.

 > As well as a Native Oberon project.
 >
 > http://sourceforge.net/projects/nativeoberon

Not very inspiring this one. Good initiative though. What struck me with 
the oberon project was that the language was 'Pascal'. Is there a good and 
affordable Oberon compiler for Linux?

If there is none, a good and free Modula-2 compiler might be a good 
starting point to make an Oberon0 compiler for Linux. I am quite fond of 
the Mocka compiler. It may not be the very best you can get, but everyone 
can get it and it runs stable.

I know of XDS, but it's more or less a frontend for a C compiler.

 > Native Oberon only has a program for converting
 > Oberon Text to/from "marked up ASCII" but so far the second step
 > (taking all of the NO source, converting it
 > and uploading it) hasn't been done.  I really
 > haven't paid much attention to this project
 > because I don't use NO very often, but I do
 > see potential for the overall community.  So
 > I'm going to start doing this "next step"
 > myself and hope others will join me.

Please explain a bit more. 

 > One of the nice things about Oberon is that it
 > compiles so fast that complicated "make files"
 > (which exist to avoid unneccessary compilations)
 > really aren't needed.  

This also applies to Modula-2 of course. Running the FST Modula-2 compiler 
on a 40 MHz 386 has always been very fast, even for medium sized programs. 
Never done a big project, so I can't tell about that.

 > A similair C program under Linux took much longer (painfully slow).

I guess we all have some dislikings of C, otherwise we wouldn't be here in 
the first place. 

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten

Jan Verhoeven
http://fruttenboel.verhoeven272.nl/Oberon/