[Oberon] Can ETHO be ported to ARM?

[Michal Wallace]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Chris Glur <lab.eas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can those of us who want to escape the WinTel monopoly,
> hope to use ARM based CPUs with an ETHO-like interface,
> by a porting of the existing/proven code?

Hi Chris,

This is my first post to the list, and I don't know the answer to your question.

I suspect, though, that the answer is yes.

There is already Astrobe, an oberon-2 compiler for ARM architectures:

   http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

Second, if I'm not mistaken, Dr Wirth is currently revising the
Project Oberon book
to target his RISC processor, which is somewhat similar to ARM. He talks about
it briefly in a video interview dated Jun 20, 2012:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJIqHIYSDrk

Finally, it's my understanding that the various files named "fox*.mod"
in the current
repository make up a a very flexible and retargetable compiler.

You can see the code here ( the older oberon system is distributed with
and bundled inside AOS/Bluebottle, which has some interesting UI innovations
of its own ) :

     http://code.google.com/p/ethz-oberon-repository-mirror/source/browse/#hg%2Ftrunk%2Fsource
    ( you'll have to hit "next" a few times to get to fox*.mod )

I would think that the best way to port the oberon system is to port
the oberon *compiler*
... and then replace the lowest level modules ( system, display, etc )
with code targeted to
the specific device.

-Michal