Zonnon

Zonnon is a programming language along the Oberon, Modula, and Pascal language line. Jürg Gutknecht is the author of the programming language.

Zonnon is a general purpose programming language in the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon family. Its conceptual model is based on objects, definitions, implementations and modules. Its computing model is concurrent, based on active objects which interact via syntax controlled dialogs. The language is being developed at ETH Zürich Institute for Computer Systems by Prof. Jürg Gutknecht. Zonnon introduces the concept of 'active objects' which are used to represent real world concurrent objects within computer programs. The Zonnon Language Report was written by Brian Kirk (director at Robinsons Associates), and David Lightfoot (Oxford Brookes University) working with Prof. Jürg Gutknecht (ETH, Zürich) and Dr. Eugene Zueff (Евгений Зуев) (Moscow State University).

The first book about Zonnon was published by the N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod (a.k.a. the Nizhni Novgorod State University).

Zonnon is a member of the Pascal family of languages, which has two beneficial consequences: a) it is a general purpose language and b) it is immediately familiar to Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon programmers. Most Pascal programs from the domain of algorithms and data structures are successfully compiled by the Zonnon compiler after just a few minor modifications. However, from the perspective of “programming-in-the-large”, Zonnon is much more elaborate compared to its predecessors. There are four different kinds of program units in Zonnon: objects, modules, definitions and implementations. The first two are instantiated at runtime, the third is a compile time unit of abstraction, and the fourth is a unit of composition. Here is a brief characterization:

Zonnon uses a compositional inheritance model based on aggregation. Typically, an object (or module) is composed of a number of functional components, each of them presenting itself to clients in the form of an abstract definition. The set of definitions plus the object’s intrinsic interface (that is the set of all public elements of the object) constitutes the interface between the object and its clients.

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