[Oberon] Zonnon

[Christian Demmer]

Douglas G. Danforth wrote:
>I have looked briefly at Zonnon and it became obvious to me that I 
>needed to spend significant time to absorb its essence.
>(That comment says nothing about its worth, however)

I had a look at Zonnon some time ago and as far as I remember Zonnon is
desgned for .NET (CLR CIL etc.) and has to fit in the .NET object model.
I think if you don't target .NET the language is not very useful at his
time.

>Here is an example where I *think* active objects would help me but I 
>don't know since the overhead in implementing with active Oberon or 
>Zonnon might be greater than by some other method.  I am (as a hobby) 
>designing a rotary engine.  I have graphically depicted it.  But now I 
>would actually like to put hot gas into the engine and see how it 
>performs as a function of temperature, pressure, etc.  I *think* one way 
>to do this is to use aggregated atoms (clusters of atoms which have 
>similar attributes) to approximate the 10^23 atoms in a real engine.  I 
>prefer to do that rather than attempting to solve the Navier-Stokes 
>equation for my geometry.

I'm no expert on engine simulation, but I would suspect that you need
thousands of clusters and that would mean thousands of threads, which do
some small calculations. Most of the time is then spend on thread
switching instead of number crunching.

For my taste Active Objects are too "heavy" to have lots of them around.

>Hence my over riding question is:  what do I gain by using, say, Zonnon?

.NET support.

>Now, here is what I would really like to see in a computer language:  
>Automatic implementation of mathematical theories that I write using a pen.
>I assume this is still many decades in the future.

So do I. Even worse, I assume that computers will never really think.
That means all the easy mechanical work is done by computers and the
really hard thinking is the only work left to us humans :-)

Greetings, Christian