[Oberon] Intermediate scopes in Oberon-07

[Richard Hable]

On 2018-02-24 22:16, Andreas Pirklbauer wrote:

> Of the 17 local procedures (of 850 total) in the Oberon
> system, I have not found one that meets that description.

I wonder about the assumption that the current implementation of the
Oberon System is somehow the only reference to decide about the
necessity or utility of features in the Oberon programming language.

We all know that Wirth designed the Oberon System as a tool for
teaching, and the Oberon programming language as tool for implementing
this system. Also, when leaving out features in Oberon compared to
Modula-2 (e.g. co-routines), he clearly stated that this does not mean
that the feature itself is unnecessary, but that he did not need it for
the implementation of this system.

Nevertheless, Oberon is certainly a general purpose programming
language, and it would be a shame to only use it for a single project.

Thus, unless a feature actually leads to bad programming, like the EXIT
statement or the RETURN statement at arbitrary positions within a
procedure, there is no need to remove it from all alternative
implementations and languages descendents, just because the current
version of the Oberon language definition does not contain it anymore.

Richard