[Oberon] [EXT] Oberon V4 Windows startup oberon.exe

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Andreas:

I think it is wise to stay with one compiler. I remember that the number of LOOP statements in the original Oberon System was small. The RETURN statements are a bigger issue for me because I use them quite often to exit the procedures. I have some bright ideas to implement, so work on B2 is unavoidable anyway. I am more worried about the rest of the V4 than about my own stuff which will evolve anyway. 

Thank you,
Wojtek

________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Andreas Pirklbauer [andreas_pirklbauer at yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2020 4:13 AM
To: Oberon List
Subject: [Oberon]  [EXT] Oberon V4 Windows startup oberon.exe

   > Andreas:
   > would it be possible to bring your compiler closer to the previous Oberon-2 implemented under V4 in order to make porting a bit easier?

It’s definitely possible, but the choice made was to implement (now revised) Oberon-2 as a superset of Oberon-07, in order to benefit from the refinements made in the language over the years, e.g., the elimination of the LOOP, EXIT and RETURN (in its original form) statements plus several other smaller changes.

The upside is (in my view at least) a cleaner version of Oberon-2. The downside is, of course, that if you want to port V4 using *that* Oberon-2 compiler, you’d need to refactor and touch the source code of *many, many* source files, replacing al LOOP statements with WHILE statements, etc.

A tedious task! But a one-time effort.

PS: If someone (not me!) volunteers to build an “original” Oberon-2 compiler for FPGA RISC5, I would recommend building an entirely separate compiler, i.e. *not* mix and match features.