[Oberon] The Oberon answer to Arduino

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jan Verhoeven [mailto:jan at verhoeven272.nl]
> Sent: Thursday, 3 January 2013 7:12 AM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] The Oberon answer to Arduino
> 
> Watch it with MIPS cores. 128 Kb of flash is a mere 32 K-instruction word
> (Kiw) since each instruction is 4 bytes. 32 Kiw is enough for a BASIC
> interpreter, but I doubt if it would fit anything resembling Oberon.
> 

You can do a lot in 128Kb with software written in Oberon. I have had a
(very) experimental version of the Lilith Modula-2 M-Code interpreter which
can run 16-bit Modula-2 programs produced by the ETH M2M-PC compiler on an
ARM board. The interpreter executable is only about 28Kb. Admittedly it is
the bare basics but you could do a lot with an extra 100Kb. 

I also experimentally compiled Wirth's Oberon compiler which is written in
Oberon using the Astrobe compiler and that produced an ARM executable which
is still only 80Kb. This might become about 100Kb if it was fully
operational. However, you would probably need more RAM than is available
on-chip on these MCUs (typically max of 64Kb) if you wanted to actually
execute the compiler on an MCU. However, I can't see really the point of
doing this when it is so easy to do cross-development using a PC.

Regards,
Chris

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
Lilith and Modula-2: 
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2