[Oberon] Just Starting With Oberon2

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Rory,
There are a few camps of Americans that use Oberon (perhaps a few hundred).
There are about 3 in Cleveland, Ohio.  Quite a bit more in California!

DLLs are relatively easy to develop using BlackBox/Component Pascal which
is now open source and contains all documentation.  You can import them and
create your own for export.  See

http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html

scroll to the bottom and download the version which (after unpacking) is 
about 35MB.
The Blackbox interface looks like Windows.  Component Pascal is a slight 
superset
of Oberon-2.

-Doug Danforth
Oberon user since 1992.

Rory Starkweather wrote:
> 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?
>
> -- 
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>
>