[Oberon] [EXT] "Make Project Oberon Pretty Again"

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Liam:

the new edition of the book would be a noble enterprise and a living monument for NW.

My own dream is that not only the text becomes pretty, but also the HDL. Ideally, this book (I mean 2013 edition) could become a teaching aid in HDL programming. The present HDL in the book is more like snippets rather than a complete literate logic code. Yes, I know that NW preferred LOLA over Verilog. He complained about Verilog. But at the end he used it. I think that LOLA sources can be preserved and exposed in the book, but the real design is Verilog. This can receive a facelift, be converted to SystemVerilog, and also to VHDL. Code of that size will not be too difficult to transform.

There were also discussions of some flaws in the floating point implementation. I do not know if these were fixed or not. It would be good if they were. I am also not sure if any official repository is going to exist and be actively maintained to accommodate such changes.

There is also a question of future direction. The original source was developed for Spartan-3 and ASRAM. This platform is now hard to get. (I recently bought the Spartan-3 Starter Kit with 1M FPGA on Ebay, but this is not a reliable source.) The HDL has been ported to Spartan-6 and Artix-7, but the ASRAM memory is not available for these platforms. In order for this workstation to stay viable it will need dynamic RAM support, though I personally prefer ZBT. To this end I can release my own board designs. One is Spartan-6 and the other is Artix-7, both featuring 4 MB of ZBT. I was trying to enlist someone to develop the ZBT controller and I ran into a solid wall of incompetence, while I do not have time to complete it myself.

The as-simple-as-possible board will feature not the DDR-x but rather HyperRAM (a.k.a. Octal SPI RAM though there are some minor differences between the Hyper and Octal). This is 16 MB in a small chip. There is no need for the SDRAM controller. One of my boards has both ZBT (4 MB) and HyperRAM (16 MB). It can be used as a development platform for both. I can release it to the community. 

There are commercial boards of course. These could be handled if there are custodians willing to support their favorite boards.

If we could realize even a small part of this dream then it would become a proper kind of a monument.

Please send me an e-mail if you are interested in going in this direction.

Thank you,
Wojtek
________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Liam Proven [lproven at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 12:01 PM
To: ETH Oberon and related systems
Subject: [EXT] [Oberon] "Make Project Oberon Pretty Again"

«

Project Oberon TeX Typesetting Project

Project Oberon is an amazing piece of computer science and amazing
tool for teaching. The book and the code demonstrate, without any tiny
amount of doubt, that it is possible to build a usable computing
system small enough to fit in the head of a normal programmer. That,
in my not-so-humble opinion, is a truly great achievement and I am in
awe of Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht for it.

The last edition -- from 2013 -- could use some tender loving care. It
should look beautiful.

This project is an attempt to:

Liberate the text from the un-editable PDF sources.
Typeset the book using (plain) TeX and Knuth's own taocpmac.tex macros.
Add the full (typeset) source code to the book for those of us who
like reading code in bed.
Convert it into a Literate Programming project where code is more
liberally scattered amongst the prose and "tangled" into the final
product.

Being a document with TeX sources, instead of a dead PDF, future
Project Oberon engineers will be able to modify the text to keep it
up-to-date with the running source code.

I have a dream that we -- as the Oberon community -- can edit and
publish this book. I would love for this to be printed as a nice
hardcover that can sit right next to my Art of Computer Programming
books.

PDF and code taken from https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.projectoberon.com__;!!CGUSO5OYRnA7CQ!fzw6on_yP7FJ0mF8n3RYE2SlpaqFOFgB4RpA9CXWs-37kFfDFNZZgtLpTuNil4JU3DAs2ApQ6tROQMHlww_0mw$
»

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/guidoism/tex-oberon__;!!CGUSO5OYRnA7CQ!fzw6on_yP7FJ0mF8n3RYE2SlpaqFOFgB4RpA9CXWs-37kFfDFNZZgtLpTuNil4JU3DAs2ApQ6tROQMGfPzhthg$


--
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