[Oberon] Realtime {WAS: Why macros were not implemented in oberon language?]

[Paul Reed]

Hi z.

> And as there are also no macros in oberon it means that when a programmer
> writes a time critical application he has no other choices left than to
> write repeating commands every time he needs to use them.
> And that makes at the end his source code less human
> readable/understandable.

Well, I would agree that makes the code less writable, but not necessarily
less readable.


> I do not know about the whole commercial sector but I am 100% sure that
> certain commercial applications can be VERY, VERY time critical!
> For example every application for autonomous vehicles is a time critical
> algorithm.
> If I would be at some company writing software for autonomous cars I would
> probably for this reason not think of oberon as language of first choice.
> And that's a pity because otherwise oberon is very good language.

This is rather a sweeping statement!  For my part, I am certainly less
unlikely to become the passenger of a self-driving car if the software was
written in Oberon. :)

Time-critical is not the same as performance.  What makes something usable
for realtime is quite subtle - predictability is often the primary
concern, and most self-inflicted complexity gets in the way here.

Prof. Wirth has used and promoted Oberon for realtime, going into these
subtleties in considerable detail.  An example of a successful project was
model helicopter control (a friend of mine who flies both model
helicopters and the real thing says that the former are more difficult to
control!) :)

See
   http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/projects.html

and the introduction to

   http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon.ARM.Compiler.pdf

Cheers,
Paul