[Oberon] Oberon Languages

[Diego Sardina]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020, at 8:36 AM, Tomas Kral wrote:
> Hi,
> 
[...]
> 
> I can distinguish Oberon-07 and Oberon-2, but there were others, too. I
> guess.
> 

Oberon was a birthplace for experimental features (sometimes toward simplification) both for language and compiler.

I remember for example Oberon-V with mathematical stuff or Lightning Oberon that eliminated type extension in favour of composition with interfaces (same to what Golang is today). Later Lightning Oberon evolved in Active Oberon becoming a bit more complex.

There was an ancient version of Oberon-2 (called Object Oberon) that introduced CLASS and MESSAGE types in the language. It was nice but not in the spirit of Oberon.
The message type was improved and evolved in Lagoona (by Michael Franz) but it was a mix between Oberon and Java. For what I remember it never saw the light (and in general the concept of message type died).

Szypersky in his EthOS dissertation proposed some variants to Oberon-2 (covariants, FINALIZE, etc...) that later become what Component Pascal is today.

There were lot of Oberon-2 extensions that went out without giving a "new name". For example parametric polymorphism, the block object, etc...

These info may be inaccurate due to my memory :-)

-- 
  Diego Sardina