[Oberon] My "Building Your Own Tools" Papers

[Paul Reed]

On 2021-08-11 01:38, Colby Russell wrote:
> Any chance that the paper ... (Building Your Own Tools: An
> Oberon Industrial Case-Study) could be added [to 
> http://projectoberon.com, or]
> ..."An Oberon Linker for an Imperfect World – More Notes on Building 
> Your
> Own Tools")?

Hi again Colby,

Thanks for your interest, yeah it would be nice to but unfortunately 
not. In those days, Springer kindly published the proceedings of the 
JMLC conferences, and required transfer of copyright, so they own it.

I note from duckduckgo that the dead-tree and electronic versions of the 
books are still available to purchase online. The references to my 
papers are below, but I was pleasantly surprised, the entire volumes are 
not prohibitively priced (in contrast to some academic publishing I've 
seen!) and there's lots of good stuff in there (besides mine of course) 
;-)

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/10722581_23
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-45213-3_28

Maybe borrow a physical copy from a library or access via an institution 
and see if it's worth it for you. As I say, definitely have a look at 
some of the other papers in each volume too while you're at it.

If you have any specific queries about the tools I described or my 
approach I'll be happy to answer them, either on the list or privately 
(preferably on the list).

I still use these tools (amongst others!) when programming, even after 
more than twenty years, and recently added an x86_64 code generator for 
Windows, BSD/Linux and macos (based heavily on the i386 generator - 
thank you AMD, nice job). I could probably write another paper (in my 
copious free time) about all the things I would have done differently, 
knowing what I know now. But hindsight is always 20/20... :)

In writing these (encouraged gently but firmly at the time by Pieter 
Muller) I was not "open-sourcing" but rather, attempting in some small 
way to follow Prof. Wirth's principle that by describing what was done, 
people would be able to understand, and not merely copy.

HTH,
Paul