[Oberon] IMPORT Modules: why does order matter?

[Andreas Pirklbauer]

   > That may be true for Oberon-2 programs written in the ivory tower of academia

My Oberon-2 “test" compiler compiles nearly all Oberon-2 programs that can be compiled by
OP2 - without a blip. And when it doesn’t, I have usually landed outside of said ivory tower ;-)


   > But I intentionally wrote to test it on a random real world module which is part of Native
   > Oberon System 3. And those modules may compile on OP2, but still are far from being
   > portable Oberon-2 specification-compliant programs.


Well, for those I can’t do much, to be honest. Too much has happened since 1990, and in
my view it would be a waste of time to somehow try to undo history and make it all “work”.

As Chris had suggested: it may be better to try to refactor the legacy apps to improve their
quality rather than working on retrogressing to the original Oberon characteristics of Oberon-2.

But even if someone refactors all those legacy apps, he/she is certain to bump into
the same issue again, as there are plenty of ambiguities left, even in Oberon-07.