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FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

98 pointsposted 3 days ago

40 Comments

sys42590

26 minutes ago

Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting.

Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.

SwellJoe

8 hours ago

A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on.

Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.

That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)

wood_spirit

6 hours ago

For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that didn’t need it - was actually much faster in TP. It was, in my eyes, the perfect blend of easy on the eyes syntax, blazingly fast compilation and runtime and small easy to share executables.

Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!

So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)

pjmlp

5 hours ago

Before Delphi, there was Turbo Pascal for Windows already, with Object Windows Library.

Versions 1.0 and 1.5.

pjmlp

5 hours ago

I am so glad to have had the luck to learn coding via various BASIC flavours, Turbo Pascal, Z80, 8086 Assembly before getting into C and C++, as I wasn't tainted about C being God's revelation for systems programming, that many seem to have.

After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.

On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.

I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.

The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.

fuzztester

2 hours ago

In what ways have they gone back to Pascal style?

pjmlp

9 minutes ago

Some things, that are not only Pascal, but languages influenced by it during the 1970-1980's.

The most obvious one is type declaration order.

Strong typing, with more explicit casts, to what C devs used to call straightjacket programming on BBS and Usenet discussions.

Striving to go back to toolchains with fast compilation times.

Being able to use high level concepts, while at the same time having the primitves for low level coding, no need for everything is a pointer, when the compiler can take care of it

The spans everyone is talking about nowadays, used to be called open arrays in Extended Pascal and Modula-2.

Arenas, were marked regions, see Mark/Release.

While one can advocate that Rust is more Standard ML, Go, Zig, Odin show clearly how Oberon or Modula-2 would look like with more curly brackets and lowercase keywords.

alexwwang

an hour ago

I usually install Lazarus on my pc though seldom use it now. Still want to pick it up someday to compensate my miss in childhood. Only used turbo C then.

Barrin92

8 hours ago

My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.

pjmlp

6 minutes ago

It definitly was, see the Turbo Pascal manuals for MS-DOS, and Windows 3.x that are available on the digital archive.

Everyone is talking about Ratatui nowadays, go check what Turbo Vision in Turbo Pascal 6 already offered in the world of MS-DOS PCs in the early 1990's, with the IDE as basis to show its capabilities as TUI framework.

lysace

8 hours ago

> Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.

You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.

https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert)

https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/

SwellJoe

8 hours ago

I did, but I prefer C. And, I prefer vim to an IDE.

rzzzt

an hour ago

Prog8 maybe then? https://prog8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#cod...

adalacelove

an hour ago

Tangentially related, but I hope will be appreciated by the nostalgic people here:

Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article:

https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt

It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.

tomcam

11 hours ago

Can't wait to try this on Mac (English manual install intstructions at https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf9...). I feel like Oberon is very much worth a look for people interested in small, powerful languages.

WillAdams

9 hours ago

The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.

eterps

4 hours ago

Oberon System 3 works on Raspberry Pi:

https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native

WillAdams

11 minutes ago

That is new since the last time I looked into this.

_Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?

rurban

2 hours ago

Wonder why they still haven't got their spark-like proof system from Ada. Would be more worth than playing with the graphics stuff, they added.

agrijakhetarpal

10 hours ago

"freeoberon-lang.org"

lysace

10 hours ago

The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in.

Extremely poor taste.

nine_k

7 hours ago

I suppose it's just imagery from the heyday of Wirth's Oberon, ca 1987.

BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.

shrubble

9 hours ago

I think some of the devs are Russian and a quick scan of the video doesn't show anything other than a shared screen for the bulk of the time (using the mouse to grab the time pointer and move it quickly through the length of the presentation).

veqq

4 hours ago

Pascal is quite common in Russia - many schools teach comp sci with it.

throwaway7356

4 hours ago

They use Yandex for e-mail, so probably a Russian group behind this.

eschaton

10 hours ago

> Extremely poor taste.

How so?

przemub

8 hours ago

Soviet imagery in countries that have been conquered by or subject to Soviet imperialism is seen extremely poorly. USSR loved its ethnic cleansing and purges, with several declared as genocide. Try, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD Soviet imagery has also been widely used by Russian propaganda in its current war against Ukraine, so it’s not only a historical matter.

kombine

2 hours ago

> Soviet imagery has also been widely used by Russian propaganda in its current war against Ukraine

That alone makes it very bad taste to use any of the Soviet imagery. I'm not sure why it's even a debatable topic at this point.

eschaton

8 hours ago

Sure. But there are also a significant number of people who are nostalgic for it and might be offended by this use for that reason, hence why I asked.

Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without explaining why, is ambiguous and just reacting defensively doesn’t address that.

kombine

2 hours ago

> Given the existence of both groups

This is a false equivalence between those who suffered from USSR and those who are ignorant of the suffering of others. I don't think we should care about feelings of a group who are for whatever reason nostalgic about a genocidal oppressive regime.

eschaton

2 hours ago

Would you treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way? The United States has caused an enormous amount of suffering in the world and has in the past had an explicit policy of genocide and oppression against a number of groups (including my wife’s ancestors), as well as a number of other horrific policies. If you would not treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way as you treat an image of the Supreme Soviet, it’s worthwhile to interrogate why.

Peoples’ feelings about the nations they are born into and told to love from birth are complex and multifaceted. The people I know who grew up in the USSR have both good and bad things to say about it, just like the people I know who grew up in the USA (like me) at the same time (the 1970s-1990s) have both good and bad things to say about it. And that isn’t just about our own experiences growing up in these respective nations, but about learning our birth nations’ true histories, and how closely (or not) the ideals espoused by their founders and politicians and important figures in their histories were reflected in their actions.

Thus I really, truly do believe it’s ambiguous for someone to say, without any further context, that they find an image of a legislature with some screen shots of an IDE placed into it offensive. Is it offensive because it’s referencing a body they consider evil or is it offensive because it’s trivializing a body they consider good? Without context it’s impossible to know, and acting like everyone shares the same context about this is just refusal to engage with the world as it is rather than the world as you’d like it to be.

jech

44 minutes ago

> Would you treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way?

No. The right analogy is an image of the Reichstag with Nazi banners.

eschaton

33 minutes ago

A lot of people will disagree with you on that.

A lot of people might also have coherent reasons to think that analogy applies equally to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.

This whole diversion is off topic and can be seen as a form of bad faith.

You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.