[Oberon] Procedure variables and local procedures

[Andreas Pirklbauer]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Burrows [mailto:chris at cfbsoftware.com] on  Sunday, 1 October 2017 9:52 AM 
> > In the original Oberon, NW defined in the low level
>> compiler module SYSTEM the procedure NEW(v, n).
>> In Oberon-07 this is not existing anymore. As Andreas Pirklbauer
>> demonstrated, this functionality can be introduced with
>> Oberon-07 > without changing the language.
>
> Not exactly. Oberon-07 doesn't allow ARRAY OF <type> in a
> type or variable declaration (excluding open array parameters
> which are a different concept). Nor does Oberon-07 allow
> POINTER TO ARRAY - pointers can only point to RECORDS
> (which can have ARRAYs as fields). If these syntax changes
> were introduced they would need to be considered as language
> extensions. There would also be the question of whether the
> feature would be restricted to single-dimensional arrays,
> what notation would be used if multi-dimensional arrays
> would be used, how many dimensions would be allowed,
> what are the rules of assignment compatibility issues etc.
> I have seen various Oberon-style implementations of this
> over the years e.g.

It would be fairly easy to add any of the features mentioned above (e.g. POINTER TO ARRAY, multi-dimensional arrays) to the solution outlined in http://www.github.com/andreaspirklbauer/Oberon-generic-heap-allocation , but that is the one thing I did *not* want to do: extend the language itself. 

It can of course be done, but one should note that one can always just create a record that then contains any data structure one needs. The downside is that it introduces one additional field in the code, e.g. you write ptr.a[3] instead of ptr[3], where ptr is a POINTER TO R, and R is a RECORD a: ARRAY OF <type> END, making it a little less natural to read.

Just my two (Swiss) Rappen..

-AP
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