[Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> rochus.keller at bluewin.ch
> Sent: Thursday, 2 January 2020 8:41 AM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Oberon] Fwd: 30th anniversary of Oberon
> 
> Okay, no one seems to care. 

Wait at least a week before drawing that conclusion. Some of us are in different timezones to you. Many of us are on holiday. Some only get weekly digests of this mailing list.

> However, I did a little more research.
> Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any consensus on the date of
> Oberon's release. 

Define 'release'. Do you mean first successful implementation, first publicly available version, something else?

> The German Wikipedia states 1991, the English
> Wikipedia 1986, the French and Italian Wikipedia "1986, 1987 et
> 2007". Wirth on his homepage references two language versions: 1990
> and the revised 2007. There is apparently a prior language report
> from 1988: https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380180707. 1986 is only
> mentioned in the HOPL paper ("the language was fully defined in early
> 1986"), but the referenced report is the one from 1988. This gives us
> a whole range of publication years to choose from.
> 

The first time I heard of Oberon was when the article "From Modula to Oberon" was posted on the bulletin board of the Journal of Pascal, Ada and Modula-2. It was timestamped Tue Feb 23 20:43:46 1988.

Regards,
Chris Burrows

CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com