[Oberon] Easter eggs in Oberon

[Andreas Pirklbauer]

   > OK. But this is for the RISC-5 processor. Does another processor exist with in its instruction set special
   > machine instructions for byte arithmetic? If that would be the case then one could argue that * can be
   > overloaded for 'byte multiplication' when Oberon were used for that architecture. Or is that too far fetched…?
   >
   > Did you follow the discussion with Jörg about the validity of 3. byte multiplication operator in the list?
   > What do you think of my argument?

To the best of my knowledge, most modern processors don’t have instructions specific to bytes. In the past, there were of course 8 bit processors (such as 6502 way back in the last millenium), but today most processors have either 32 or 64 bit arithmetic, or both, built in by default.

For example, on the RISC-V you have either XLEN = 32 or 64 bits. So there I do the same thing as on Oberon on RISC5,when making assignment to variables of type BYTE. i.e. first do the multiplication in 32 or 64 bits, then modify the assignment (!) not the multiplcation.