[Oberon] What is the status of Lola-2 and its use in the FPGA version ofProject Oberon?

[Paul Reed]

Dear Mr. Keller,

Although Lola was designed as an introductory hardware description 
language, I've used it in my own commercial work where it has had some 
nice advantages.

It's also the best example I know of a transpiler which actually 
generates readable code. :)


> But PO FPGA seems to be implemented in Verilog instead... independently 
> developed...and more current.

After the FPGA Project Oberon was finished, Prof. Wirth circled back and 
implemented it in Lola-2 as an exercise ("Translating from Lola to 
Verilog" on his Lola page 
https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Lola/index.html describes the 
motivation).  The Lola version is not always completely in step with 
bugfixes and tweaks but it's close.  See 
https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/news.txt.


> There even seem to be differences between the syntax used in the Lola 
> source files and
> the one specified in the language report (e.g. TYPE ... "=" vs. ":=").

This seems to have been an experiment and I recently persuaded Prof. 
Wirth to go back to the "=" version, to be like Oberon.  I had thought 
he had updated it.  Apologies.

Paul