[Oberon] too many versions of Oberon (4me)

[Greg Haynes]

Charles Angelich wrote:
> 
> ...
> I've spent the better part of the afternoon reading about Oberon System 3
> and Oberon V4.
> 
> Would anyone reading this list have any opinions regarding these two
> versions of Oberon?

I've been using Oberon V4 for quite a few years, and I think it has
some advantages for beginning users.  My first experience with this
system was to download a version for the DEC Ultrix workstation.  I was
able to install the software by reading only a short text file that was
included in the FTP directory - it definitely was not necessary to install
the software in order to read how to install it!  (Also, I was completely
on my own - no contact with any other Oberon users except with ETH by email)
After installing the software, I learned how to use the environment - mouse,
text editor, compiler, etc. by reading the documentation within Oberon.  The
workstation did have a 3-button mouse, which I think is almost essential in
V4 unless you have a very high tolerance for awkward mouse and control
key combinations.

I now use V4 with the Linz extensions on a SPARC workstation.  I don't really
have much experience with the Windows version, but I would recommend getting
the software from the Linz Oberon distribution - their extensions are really
very useful.  I think their documentation is pretty good, also.

The biggest disadvantage of V4 is that there is no development and almost
no support.  I suspect that there may be only a few people in the
world using SPARC-Oberon.  (If I'm wrong, I would like to hear from some
of the users!)  On the other hand, the software is very reliable and
for my purposes has excellent capabilities - the Coco/R compiler-compiler,
Kepler for adding diagrams to documentation, and Elems for GUI construction.
These tools provide excellent core capabilities for a software
development environment and for simplicity they cannot be matched anywhere.

-Greg