[Oberon] Communicating with aliens

[Chris Burrows]

> He releases a compiler and doesn't offer an error reporting system. 

Personally I prefer Wirth spends his time working on what he is good at i.e.
developing the compiler, Verilog sources and Lola and let others like myself
who are not so skilled in those areas to look after handling error reports,
support issues etc. 

It is immportant to note that the well-documented, high quality, Project
Oberon system is not your typical type of open source system. Unfortunately
all too often all you get is pre-alpha quality source code that the
developer (or more accurately 'hacker' - in the traditional sense of the
word) cannot be bothered to test or document. Given the choice of the
Cathedral or the Bizarre (sic) I'd go for the Cathedral approach any day.

In my experience in the last eight years of working with Wirth's Oberon-07
compilers bugs are as scarce as hen's teeth. I have always found him (and
Paul) to be very communicative and generous with their time whenever I have
contacted them. 

However, in the unlikely event that you think you have discovered a bug and
you prefer to use a different form of communication than email you are
welcome to report it on the Astrobe forum and I'll see what I can do to
help:

http://www.astrobe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=452

The last reported (and fixed) bug in our Cortex-M3/M4 Oberon-07 compilers
was in June last year. As far as I remember only three bugs have been
reported in this ETH mailing list since Project Oberon was released a couple
of years ago and they have all since been fixed. Hence it would be difficult
to justify the use of a formalised bug-reporting system. Chances are that
such a system would be more complex than Project Oberon!

There is no comparison between Oberon and Delphi when it comes to quality. I
have been using Delphi since v1.0 in Feb 199S. The initial release was very
good but went rapidly downhill from about v4 onwards. Since then Delphi
typically has had something like 500 bugs active at any one time so Borland
/ CodeGear / Embarcadero / Idera would not be able to manage them without a
formalised system, 

Regards,
Chris Burrows 

CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com