Oberon programming language
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| Paradigm | imperative, structured, modular, object-oriented |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Niklaus Wirth |
| First appeared | 1986 |
| Typing discipline | strong, hybrid (static and dynamic) |
| Website | www |
| Influenced by | |
| Modula-2 | |
| Influenced | |
| Oberon-2, Zonnon, Go, Nim | |
Oberon is a general-purpose programming language created in 1986 by Niklaus Wirth and the latest member of the Wirthian family of ALGOL-like languages (Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Modula-2). Oberon was the result of a concentrated effort to increase the power of Modula-2, the direct successor of Pascal, and simultaneously to reduce its complexity. Its principal new feature is the concept of type extension of record types: It permits the construction of new data types on the basis of existing ones and to relate them, deviating from the dogma of strictly static data typing. Type extension is Wirth's way of inheritance reflecting the viewpoint of the parent site. Oberon was developed as part of the implementation of the Oberon operating system at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The name is from the moon of Uranus, Oberon.
Oberon is still maintained by Wirth and the latest revision is dated May 3, 2016.
Oberon is designed with a motto attributed to Albert Einstein in mind: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The principal guideline was to concentrate on features that are basic and essential and to omit ephemeral issues. Another factor was recognition of the growth of complexity in languages such as C++ and Ada: in contrast to these, Oberon emphasizes the use of the library concept for extending the language. Enumeration and subrange types, which were present in Modula-2, have been removed; similarly, set types have been limited to small sets of integers, and the number of low-level facilities has been sharply reduced (most particularly, type transfer functions have been eliminated). Elimination of the remaining potentially-unsafe facilities concludes the most essential step toward obtaining a truly high-level language. Very close type-checking even across modules, strict index-checking at run time, null-pointer checking, and the safe type extension concept largely allow the programmer to rely on the language rules alone.
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