Abstract

The programming language Oberon is the result of a concentrated effort to increase the power of Modula-2 and simultaneously to reduce its complexity. Several features were eliminated, and a few were added in order to increase the expressive power and flexibility of the language. This paper describes and motivates the changes. The language is defined in a concise report. Introduction The programming language Oberon evolved from a project whose goal was the design of a modern, flexible, and efficient operating system for a single-user workstation. A principal guideline was to concentrate on properties that are genuinely essential and - as a consequence - to omit ephemeral issues. It is the best way to keep a system in hand, to make it understandable, explicable, reliable, and efficiently implementable. Initially, it was planned to express the system in Modula-2 [1] (subsequently called Modula), as that language supports the notion of modular design quite effectively, and because an oper...

Citations

1392	The C++ Programming Language - Stroustrup - 1995
1208	SmallTalk-80: The Language and its Implementation - Goldberg, Robson - 1983
141	Programming in Modula-2 - Wirth - 1982
81	The programming language Oberon - Wirth - 1988
50	Type extensions - Wirth - 1988
40	The Oberon System - Wirth, Gutknecht - 1989
12	Object Pascal Report - Tesler - 1985
2	The programming language Oberon (Revised Report). (companion paper - Wirth