[Oberon] Just Starting With Oberon2

[Rory Starkweather]

 I've been looking at Oberon for a couple of months but didn't find a 
version that fit my needs until I found the Oxford version. To tell you 
the truth, I wasn't able to figure out how to do anything useful with 
the ETH Windows plugin version, and POW didn't run on my system for some 
reason.

 There are a couple of questions I would like to ask. (Nothing about 
programming yet because I'm still on page 10 of the manual.)

1. Is Oberon still being actively developed?
2. How widespread is Oberon use in Europe? I haven't found any Americans 
who have heard of it yet.
3. Most of the programming I do involves a Visual Basic GUI with DLLs 
written in either C or D doing the actual work when I need power or 
speed. As I understand it, the 'virtual machine' interface between 
compiled Oberon code and the CPU is relatively slow. I don't really care 
about that, but I'm wondering if there is ever going to be a version of 
the compiler that produces machine code? Or does Native mode make that 
unneccessary?
4. Considering item 3, has anyone done any work on a DLLcapability for 
Oberon that works above the assembly language level?