Concept
Oberon is a general-purpose programming language first published in 1987 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 constructing new data types on the basis of existing ones and to relate them, deviating from the dogma of strictly static typing of data. Type extension is Wirth's way of inheritance reflecting the viewpoint of the parent site. Oberon was developed as part of the implementation of an operating system, also named Oberon at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The name is from the moon of the planet Uranus, named Oberon. Oberon is still maintained by Wirth and the latest Project Oberon compiler update is dated 6 March 2020. 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 to extend the language. Enumeration and subrange types, which were present in Modula-2, were omitted, and set types are limited to sets of integers. All imported items must be qualified by the name of the module where they are declared. Low-level facilities are highlighted by only allowing them to be used in a module which includes the identifier SYSTEM in its import list. Strict type checking, even across modules, and index checking at runtime, null pointer checking, and the safe type extension concept largely allow programming to rely on the language rules alone. The intent of this strategy was to produce a language that is easier to learn, simpler to implement, and very efficient.
