[Oberon] Why macros were not implemented in oberon language?

[nyaaa at nyaaa.de]

> One additional remark: Someone mentioned Ada as a language similar to
> Oberon. I think Nimrod is a much better modern and powerful
alternative
> (with similar syntax) -- the guy(s) seems to be really smart and work
> very hard on the language. The compiler has some 10k lines of code and
> compiles itself in a few seconds. And it seems to support nearly all
> concepts of modern languages like generics, macros, type inference,
> garbage collection, parallel processing...And performance is already
> close to C.

But Nimrod is certainly less mature than Ada. It's specification is
still unfinished and subject to change. Ada is no such moving target and
commercially supported on numerous platforms. You probably should not
use some pre-1.0 language implementation to write software that must not
fail. And you might find certain features in one language that are not
present in the other and vice versa. Then you can't generally say that
one is "better". And Ada is not exactly bad. Someone recently wrote a
nice article that gives a good impression of its features:
http://cowlark.com/2014-04-27-ada/index.html

Nimrod is an interesting project though, and its author is certainly not
totally unfamiliar with Wirth's work, considering that the Nimrod
compiler was bootstrapped with Free Pascal. Both Ada and Nimrod are
significantly larger languages than Oberon though and each language
ultimately follows a different philosophy. It is up to the user to
carefully decide, which one best suits his needs.