[fpc-pascal] TurboVision is reborn as FOSS (again)

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2020 at 19:25, <greim at schleibinger.com> wrote:

> As you may know, Niklaus Wirth developed Oberon as a successor of Pascal.
> Its near identical to Pascal, just yet another name.

Indeed. There is a somewhat active mailing list over on:
ETH Oberon and related systems <oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch>

As I understand it, Wirth had some fairly radical ideas about upgrade
Algol-60, but the Algol committee didn't like them and went with
Adriaan van Wijngaarden's proposal instead, creating Algol-68, causing
"shock, horror and dissent" and leading one computer scientist to read
the huge report trying to find what "language was hidden inside of
it".

It was more or less the end of Algol. Wirth released his proposal as
Algol-W and later refined it into a new language, named after great
French philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal.

Later came Modula, which is Pascal with modules, and then Modula-2. So
in a way, Modula was Pascal 2 and Modula-2 is Pascal 3.

(Modula-3 was someone else, so outside the sequence.)

Acorn, the British company who invented the ARM chip, tried to develop
a whole new OS for the new computer in Modula-2, but failed. Instead,
a last-ditch skunkworks effort to modernise their 6502 machines' OS,
MOS, resulted in Arthur, renamed RISC OS in version 2. It is still
alive and maintained today and there is a FOSS fork of it which runs
on the Raspberry Pi. This came up recently over on the FPC web fora.

After building the OS of his Lilith workstation in Modula-2, Wirth
realised it was not ideal for OS development and built Oberon (the
language) for his Ceres workstation workstation instead.

Oberon therefore could be seen as Pascal 4!

> Its not only a compiler but also a development environment, including an editor and also an own OS and GUI !

Indeed. I've been trying to get people on the Oberon mailing list
interested in the idea of a native port of Oberon for the Raspberry
Pi. The language compiler can target ARM.

The slight snag is that the original Oberon OS only supports 1 CPU and
has no threading. There are multiple successor languages to Oberon.

First, Wirth and collaborators did Oberon-2 -- so that, in a way, is Pascal 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2

Then another, Active Oberon (Pascal 6?) which also has its own OS
called AOS, A2 and sometimes Bluebottle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Oberon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS

A derivative of Oberon 2, minus the OS, is sold as a Windows
development environment called Component Pascal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Pascal

And finally, Wirth's latest iteration is Oberon-07, which is derived
from the original Oberon, not from Oberon 2 or Active Oberon. So I
suppose the version numbering finally converges and Oberon-07 is also
Pascal 7.

A2/Bluebottle OS used to have a StrongARM version, so I think getting
it running on modern ARM hardware would not be impossible, and might
attract a much larger audience than the expensive FPGA boards that
Project Oberon 2018 currently runs on:
http://www.projectoberon.net/ostation/OberonStationQR.pdf

I wrote about it here:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/12/02/pi_versus_oberton/

> He developed it with Gutknecht mainly at the Xerox PARC labs, long before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made their own copies of the ALTO work-station.

Yup. Good summary/overview here:
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/


> P.S. **) don't mix RISC-5 up with the now popular RISC-V architecture. Wirth is a genius, but has never
> a lucky hand for finding good and unique names for his projects. So from
> Algol to Pascal to Modula to Oberon to Oberon-2 to A2 to Project Oberon...

Oberon now runs on RISC-V as well:
https://github.com/solbjorg/oberon-riscv




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