January 2020 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 05 Jan '20

05 Jan '20

@ Joerg Straube Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of the 89 version so far. I assume you have seen the section "Differences between Oberon and Revised Oberon" on page 10 in the first paper in the referenced document. I've not seen such a section for Oberon 90. Do we actually have access to the source code of the earlier versions of the Oberon System, especially the one referred to by the 1988 paper (see https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-000487176, presumably written in Obern 87), and the one which was released in 1989 (see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1411838, presumably written in Oberon 89), and the first version used for courses in 1990 (presumably written in Oberon 90)? Best R. _______________________________ From: Joerg Sent on: Sat, 04 Jan 2020 22:20:04 +0100 To: ETH Oberon and related systems Cc: Subject: Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon Here is the language report of Oberon89 https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/68899… No DEFINITION nor IMPLEMENTATION. Very close to Oberon90. BYTE is still in the language not in SYSTEM yet. br Jörg

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 04 Jan '20

04 Jan '20

@ Joerg Straube Interesting point, thanks. >> Oberon 90 can be seen more „grown up“ and more distinguishable from Modula-2 ... The language refinement went on with Oberon-07. This correlates with the presentation of the versions on Prof. Wirth's homepage (https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/) "Oberon Oberon at a Glance Programming in Oberon (a Tutorial) The Programming Language Oberon (1990) The Programming Language Oberon-07 (Revised Oberon) Difference between Oberon-07 and Oberon ..." @ Till Oliver Knoll >> shouldn‘t we not celebrate Oberon 90‘s birthday in 2020? That was my original question; but celebrating in 2020 would not fit the pattern; the last official anniversary was the 25th in 2011, apparently assuming the year of birth to be 1986 (what is somewhat difficult to understand after the facts now available). Best R.

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 03 Jan '20

03 Jan '20

@ Joerg Straube Ok, thanks. >> The first Oberon system on Ceres 1 was programmed in Oberon 87. >From that I conclude that Oberon 87 was actually used at least for two years and there was a release of an Oberon System which was officially written in Oberon 87. Thus Oberon 87 is not simply a theoretical approach, but an original, field-tested "product". From Nemo Nusquam we've heard that Oberon 87 continued to live at Ulm university. >> The Oberon compiler (and Oberon system) evolved gradually to Oberon 90. I see, but as far as I understand this gradual evolvment happend after the Oberon System on Ceres 1 (which was written in Oberon 87) was released. From the fact that Oberon 87 and 90 are not compatible I conclude that both versions exist for themselves, even if (unfortunatly) they have the same name. From my point of view it would have been justified and useful to distinguish the versions by name, as was done for example with Modula versus Modula-2, Algol 58 versus 60 versus 68, or Oberon versus Oberon-2. For my original question, this means that Oberon 90 can certainly be regarded as an individual achievement, which was officially published in 1990, and which therefore has its 30th anniversary in 2020. But since Oberon 87 and 90 were not distinguished by name, people will probably consider 1987 as the official Oberon publication date. For me, this is a satisfactory answer to the issue. Best R.

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 03 Jan '20

03 Jan '20

@ Joerg Straube Very interesting, thank you. >From your findings I conclude that these languages are not compatible, i.e. source code written in Oberon 87 cannot simply be recompiled with an Oberon 90 compiler; there are different key words, statements, built-in procedures and import/export concepts. I wonder whether the Oberon system was first implemented in Oberon 87 and then migrated to Oberon 90, or whether the authors gradualy modified the language during implementation and the result was an Oberon system implemented in what later was specified as Oberon 90. Does anyone have information about this? The HOPL-3 paper gives no indication besides that the first Oberon system was released in 1989 and took about two years development time, and it was used for courses from 1990. Oberon 90 was officially published here https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-000561428. Didn's find an official English publication so far (just the copy from Wirth's homepage). Best R. _______________________________ From: Joerg Sent on: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 14:40:47 +0100 To: ETH Oberon and related systems Cc: Subject: Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon I tried to quickly collect the differences of Oberon87 and Oberon90. Perhaps I missed some: 1) What is exported? 87: mentioned in DEFINITION 90: declaration marked with * 2) What is a string? 87: enclosed by “ “ or ‘ ‘ 90: enclosed by “ “ 3) reserved words 87: 31+CLOSE, DEFINITION, IMPLEMENTATION 90: 31+MODULE 4) predefined identifier 87: 29 + BYTE, ADR, LSH, ROT 90: 29 + BYTE (this is a typo in the report!!) 5) Module SYSTEM 87: no 90: yes (ADR, LSH, ROT, BYTE, BIT, VAL, NEW) 6) WHILE with ELSIF 87: yes 90: no 7) formal parameter for any actual parameter 87: ARRAY OF BYTE 90: ARRAY OF SYSTEM.BYTE 8) LEN(v) equivalent to LEN(v, 0) 87: no 90: yes 9) alias import 87: IMPORT M : M0; 90: IMPORT M := M0; br Jörg

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by Chris Burrows 02 Jan '20

02 Jan '20

> -----Original Message----- > From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces@lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of > rochus.keller(a)bluewin.ch > Sent: Thursday, 2 January 2020 8:41 AM > To: oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch > Subject: [Oberon] Fwd: 30th anniversary of Oberon > > Okay, no one seems to care. Wait at least a week before drawing that conclusion. Some of us are in different timezones to you. Many of us are on holiday. Some only get weekly digests of this mailing list. > However, I did a little more research. > Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any consensus on the date of > Oberon's release. Define 'release'. Do you mean first successful implementation, first publicly available version, something else? > The German Wikipedia states 1991, the English > Wikipedia 1986, the French and Italian Wikipedia "1986, 1987 et > 2007". Wirth on his homepage references two language versions: 1990 > and the revised 2007. There is apparently a prior language report > from 1988: https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380180707. 1986 is only > mentioned in the HOPL paper ("the language was fully defined in early > 1986"), but the referenced report is the one from 1988. This gives us > a whole range of publication years to choose from. > The first time I heard of Oberon was when the article "From Modula to Oberon" was posted on the bulletin board of the Journal of Pascal, Ada and Modula-2. It was timestamped Tue Feb 23 20:43:46 1988. Regards, Chris Burrows CFB Software http://www.astrobe.com

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30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 02 Jan '20

02 Jan '20

According to https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon.Report.pdf Oberon can celebrate its 30th birthday on October 1. of this year. Algol 60 has even its 60th anniversary this year, see http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol60_report_CA… . Is there any celebration of this at ETH Zurich? Best R.

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by rochus.keller＠bluewin.ch 02 Jan '20

02 Jan '20

@ Treutwein Bernhard Great, thanks. These are apparently the same two texts that appeared in the journals in 1988. Since it's an official ETH technical report made accessible to public on September 1987 and taking into accound all previously stated facts I conclude that the official first appearance/pubilcation year of the Oberon programming language is 1987. Therefore the official 25th anniversary was in 2012 and the 30th anniversary in 2017. The Wikipedia pages are wrong; I will try to fix them. I'm still interested in the differences of the 1987 and 1990 versions of the language reports. Before I start a cross-correlation maybe someone has done that already or has an official description. Concluding from the HOPL paper Oberon 90 (not 87) was apparently used for teaching, and also Prof. Wirth on his homepage only mentions Oberon 90 (the attribute "revised" is only attached to the 2007 version when you look at https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/) Best R. _______________________________ From: Treutwein Bernhard Sent on: Thu, 02 Jan 2020 12:58:55 +0100 To: oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch Cc: Subject: Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon > Usually it's the date of an official publication, such as the 1988 language report which was published in > Wiley Software: Practice & Experience. Also an official techical report of a university or similar documents > are official publications. I don't think the date when the document was written or an idea was stabilized is > the relevant date. The earliest publication, meeting one of these criteria I found, is the following: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/68917 or the full text https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/68917… -- Bernhard -- Oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon

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Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon
by Treutwein Bernhard 02 Jan '20

02 Jan '20

> Usually it's the date of an official publication, such as the 1988 language report which was published in > Wiley Software: Practice & Experience. Also an official techical report of a university or similar documents > are official publications. I don't think the date when the document was written or an idea was stabilized is > the relevant date. The earliest publication, meeting one of these criteria I found, is the following: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/68917 or the full text https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/68917… -- Bernhard

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QEMU target implementation for Oberon RISC architecture
by Charles Perkins 01 Jan '20

01 Jan '20

This is to let you all know about a fork of QEMU (a very fast emulator with lots of features) introducing the Oberon RISC architecture. https://github.com/io-core/qemu-risc6 It is unfinished and I probably should have waited to announce it but the new year starts soon and I just want to share some pretty (to me) pictures. As it says in the readme on the github page, the target is named risc6 to avoid confusion with the already existing riscv target in qemu and because in one communication (An Update of the RISC5 Implementation <https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/RISC5.Update.pdf>) Professor Wirth defines module RISC6 to introduce interrupts into the architecture. I intend to update the readme with build instructions and binaries that can be simply downloaded, etc. Happy Hacking, Chuck

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Re: [Oberon] QEMU target implementation for Oberon RISC architecture
by Jörg 01 Jan '20

01 Jan '20

All Just to refine my idea. The second byte of the MOV’ instruction could identify the emulator as follows: Peter de Wachter’s emulator could return 50H (ASCII “P”) Andreas Pirklbauer’s emulator could return 41H (ASCII “A”) Chuck Perkin’s emulator could return 43H (ASCII “C”) Michael Schier’s emulator could return 4DH (ASCII “M”) Roel de Jong’s emulator could return 52H (ASCII “R”) I know this method does not scale. But to give the first brave emulator programmers one letter of credit ☺ And remember: it’s only an idea… Happy New Year to all of you. Jörg Von: Oberon <oberon-bounces(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch> im Auftrag von Jörg <joerg.straube(a)iaeth.ch> Antworten an: ETH Oberon and related systems <oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch> Datum: Dienstag, 31. Dezember 2019 um 09:51 An: ETH Oberon and related systems <oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch> Betreff: Re: [Oberon] QEMU target implementation for Oberon RISC architecture All Sorry, I made a typo. The correct identification code should look like this: cpu := SYSTEM.H(2019) MOD 100H; IF cpu = 53H THEN (* RISC5: with interrupts + floating-point, 31.8.2018 *) ELSIF cpu = 54H THEN (* RISC5a: no interrupts, no floating-point, 1.9.2018*) ELSIF cpu = 0A0H THEN (* RISC0, 26.12.2013 *) END ; First of all, the CPU version identification is an undocumented feature. So only NW knows, if it will be supported in the future. Perhaps we as Oberon community can agree on how emulators shall identify itself. I see four thinkable ways Return one of the values above, as the real FPGA HW would do. Be totally transparent to the Oberon code. Return another value, so the Oberon code might find out that it’s running on an emulator if he wants to do so Use a few of the 20 unused bits in the instruction, currently set to 0. This has the benefit that the CPU version is still one of the defined ones, and we can detect the CPU feature set foreseen by NW. We still have the possibility to detect on what emulator this CPU is implemented. Define a new (still unused) instruction to just return the emulator version. My recommendation would be: c). Just as an idea: use the second lowest byte to identify the emulator. As example: SYSTEM.H(2019) DIV 100H MOD 100H would identify the emulator. br Jörg -- Oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon

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