@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

Out of curiosity, in your opinion and experience, what are the advantages of Oberon-2 over Oberon-07?

(I don't think it's a matter of worth: that page explicitly states that "It does not document variants, e.g. Component Pascal, Oberon-2, unless those are treated as extensions", that in fact looks reasonable to reduce confusion, given the site name...)

@https://qoto.org/users/Shamar hello, hard to answer after a hard work day.

well, i don't know, i think they are comparable. oberon-07 is the simplest oberon compiler ever written. i actually have my implementation, that's the earliest port of wirth's compiler made in 2008. since then wirth changed his compiler a lot. i like my o7 implementation because it doesn't depend on libc, generates very compact code. but works only under 32bit linux. but because i wasn't sure i can distribute it, i started working on oberon-2 compiler by using op2 and ofront.

i recently figured out, it is not a problem so i published it, but i don't think it is very useful, compared to voc, because voc is ported to many platforms, and has a lot of libraries. i like in my o7c implementation that i have zero dependency on C code. the only deps are just GNU assembler and linker. i am thinking of writing a completely new compiler with the new parser, which won't be based on op2 or latest po13 wirth's compiler. i am thinking of supporting both o-07 and o-2 dialects in it.

so oberon-2 introduced so called 'type bound procedures' - the type of oop people tend to like.

i myself, however, whenever possible use just oberon-1 or oberon-07 style oop.

however i like that oberon-2 has syntax that explicitly mentions that a dynamic array is actually a 'POINTER TO ARRAY OF CHAR' but i know that wirth doesn't like that notation.

yes, btw, oberon-2 has dynamic arrays, oberon-07 doesn't, according to report. i think if i remember correctly, wirth's implementation has dynamic arrays that work with 'ARRAY OF CHAR' declaration.

i think overall oberon-2 and po2 based compilers are pretty mature, and a lot of code have been compiled with oberon-2, and it shown its strengths both in Oberon V4 and S3. also component pascal is basically an extension of oberon-2.

while i have an impression that wirth's latest compiler, though is a masterpiece of compiler design, and as i said, it's a simplest oberon compiler ever written, but i think it's not as mature, and it was not used as much, and therefore, debugged as much.

i like some features of oberon-07, such as read only global variable export. i also like the string assignment syntactic sugar of oberon-07, btw voc has it as well.

voc today is very practical. it works on linux/windows/macos, i used it on arm, on arm64, on many different platforms. its code is very fast, it has very low memory footprint. it is very easy to prepare wrappers to c libraries.

i wrote my irc bot with voc, it serves in several irc rooms today, including oberon room.

it's not a compiler of my dream, but it's practical.

i myself have mixed feelings, i like oberon-07, and i like oberon-2. i think it won't complicate my new compiler a lot if i support both languages in one, and have a commandline switch for the syntax check. let's see if i write it. (: i hope i'll find time. recently i am too busy at work, work under pressure, and have not much time for other activities.