[Oberon] Ofront+

[Oleg N. Cher]

Dear Oberoners,

I'm really surprised that many people here are hearing about Online 
Oberon for the first time. I've known about it for a long time.

In order to inform the public, I want to tell you about my own fork of 
Josef Templ's project Ofront: https://github.com/jtempl/ofront/

Ofront+ is a direct continuation of the ideas embedded in the Ofront 
project. But it expands number of supported Oberon dialects:

   Oberon/Oberon-2

   Oberon-07/16 (support is still in-work,
                 but users need to encourage this direction)

   Component Pascal (almost everything is supported
                     except 2-byte CHAR type, even some GPCP extensions)

   Oberon-3 (experimental dialect with constant arrays and "proper FOR")

We can also use multiple dialects in a single project.

Ofront+ also increases the number of available target architectures:

   BlackBox Component Builder
   FreeBSD amd64
   Linux amd64
   Linux armv7
   Linux i386
   OpenBSD amd64
   OpenBSD armv7
   OpenBSD i386
   macOS X
   MS Windows 32 bits
   MS Windows 64 bits

Ofront+ was tested and used with C compilers:

   GCC/MinGW, 32/64 bits
   Clang
   SDCC (Small Device C Compiler)
   Tiny C (tcc)
   cc65 (for CPU 6502)

The latest build of Ofront+ you can get here:

   https://github.com/Oleg-N-Cher/OfrontPlus

I have been working on this for many years and try to keep the project 
afloat all the time. It's not very documented and it's not covered by a 
huge set of tests, but I do what I can based on my modest strength.

I didn't plan to go that far, I just needed to make a few changes. Then 
I wanted to make support for Windows. Now we have the result of this 
work. I still want to do a lot before the release of version 1.0, but 
this is already quite stable.

I won't tell you very much about the differences, but users say that I 
went too far. ;-)

Ofront+ comes as a subsystem for BlackBox and as command line tool 
(Oberon-like GUI not implemented).

So welcome, please use, write reviews and suggestions. Also I provide 
support for free.

I want to thank Josef Templ, who actively supported me and helped me 
solve many problems.

I also want to thank Stewart Greenhill, who made useful improvements and 
helped fix problems, and developed his own tools for Ofront+.

List of differences and improvements:

   https://github.com/Oleg-N-Cher/OfrontPlus/blob/master/Readme.txt

--
  Oleg N. Cher