[Oberon] BYTE in Oberon-07

[Paul Reed]

Hi August, Hans,

> In the language report BYTE is defined as "the integers between 0 and
> 255" and "The type BYTE is compatible with the type INTEGER, and
> vice-versa." This implies that INTEGER is compatible with BYTE *only*
> if the value is between 0 and 255.

When working with Prof. Wirth on the FPGA Oberon project I had already 
been asking for some time for him to consider adding BYTE to Oberon-07.  
It's really not right that CHAR is abused for such purposes (and creates 
difficulties when CHAR is not 8 bit, for example I had experimented with 
Unicode using the original ARM Oberon-07 compiler).

He smiled when he explained to me how he had added BYTE to the compiler 
with only one line of code (after I had suitably recovered from the 
revelation).  He simply reminded me that there is a difference between 
the type of something and its range.  This is a distinction which is not 
often made these days, now that machines are a bit nicer than the ones 
he grew up with.  :)

Obviously the range is not always checked in our implementation, just 
like arithmetic overflow tends not to be checked in most of his 
compilers; but this is rarely a problem in practice.

Cheers,  (and thank you very much for the enjoyable Easter-egg hunt!) :)
Paul