From: mfranz@bernina.ethz.ch (Michael Franz)
Subject: Re: MacOberon
Organization: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 09:12:17 GMT

As the author of MacOberon, please allow me to clarify a few questions
that have been addressed on the net recently:

Oberon first and foremost is a novel software development environment,
and only secondly a new programming language. The nonstandard user
interface on the Macintosh is not a matter of bad design on my part,
but an attempt to preserve the original Oberon interface as closely as
possible, as far as is possible with a one-button-mouse. There are other
implementations of Oberon for IBM PC (DOS), Sun SPARC, DEC Decstation,
IBM RiscSystem 6000 that use the identical interface. The main objective
of the Oberon port has been to make life as easy as possible for people
who use Oberon on different machines (i.e. on a high-end workstation at
work, and on a Macintosh at home), and not necessarily for the casual
Macintosh user.

While the Oberon user interface may be a matter of personal taste, it
has earned the highest praise among user interface designers. It has
never been intended for the casual user (secretary, etc.), but for
"power users" (software developers) who can custom-tailor the
system to their own requirements by editing the tools.

The "dotted notation" in the menus actually exemplifies the
triumph of the universal Oberon mechanism for command activation.
In Oberon, any command may be called directly "from the desktop"
by pointing to a string "ModuleName.ProcedureName" and pressing
a button. The items appearing in Oberon's Menus are also such
strings and are actually parsed at the time a menu item is selected.
This is very much unlike "normal" Macintosh applications, in which
the relative menu positions are hard-coded into the application and
the text appearing in the menu is completely irrelevant. Oberon's
menus can be reconfigured using ResEdit, to anything a user desires,
including the addition of commands compiled by the user himself.

There are now several universities that use the Oberon environment
for teaching programming and Oberon is used in some industrial
research labs, also in the United States. The Oberon project has been
generously supported by Digital Equipment Corp., and by IBM Research.

MacOberon requires a Macintosh equipped with a Motorola 68020
processor (or higher) and a floating-point coprocessor. It will not run
on Macintosh Classic computers. However, it does run on the Macintosh
Quadra with caching enabled, and on the Macintosh IIsi if one of several
widely available public-domain INITs is used to emulate the floating-
point coprocessor which is lacking on this model.

There are now three books available on Oberon:

	N. Wirth and M. Reiser: Programming in Oberon.
		Steps beyond Pascal and Modula_2.
	Addison Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-56543-9.
	Tutorial for the Oberon programming language and concise
		language reference.

	M. Reiser: The Oberon System.
		User Guide and Programmer's Manual.
	Addison Wesley, 1991, ISBN 0-201-54422-9.
	User manual for the programming environment and reference
		for the standard module library.

	N. Wirth and J. Gutknecht: Project Oberon.
		The Design of an Operating System and Compiler.
	Addison Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-54428-8.
	Program listings with explanations for the whole Oberon
		system, including the compiler for NS32000.

---
Michael Franz, Computersysteme, ETH Zurich

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer