Re: Five Years After

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 1:34:54 PM UTC-7, Lucretia wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 January 2018 19:06:52 UTC, Simon Clubley  wrote:
> 
> > >> I'm a  in position to talk, and I know peanuts about Oberon, but can I ask you something... What is "core" for you ? Is tasking part of it ? Full-featured generics ? Support for exceptions or clause representations ? Class-wide programming and interfaces ? Or what do you not feel as essential ?
> 
> I based on Oberon, the syntax needs to be massaged to take away the Wirthianisms that are just horrible. i.e. Uppercase keywords, ; or . and being optional or not, begin...end everywhere adding bulk.

Are upper-case keywords a Wirthianism? AFAIK, Oberon is the only one with case-sensitivity for keywords (Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and [even if not developed-by, certainly influenced-by Wirth] Ada).

';' as a separator rather than a terminator makes a certain amount of sense -- after all we don't say Function K(A : Integer; B : Character; C : Float;) Return Natural; -- but, OTOH, it *does* essentially necessitate a ";" null-statement, which I think was a good idea to avoid in Ada with "null;".

Also, I much prefer Begin and End to { and } and rather like that Ada chose to go with keywords rather than symbols -- but it was smart to subsume them into things like If/Else/End If and Loop/End Loop via the Sequence_Of_Statements grammar-construct.