Ada vs Component Pascal (was: Ada vs Delphi?)

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

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In article <37b1282b.43031685@news.total.net>,
  aratel@total.net (Andre Ratel) wrote:

> Have you looked into Component Pascal? It is the latest
> brainchild of Niklaus Wirth (the inventor of Pascal, Modula,,
> and Oberon).
>
> The product is named Black Box. I have dowloaded it last
> Anyhow, I you want to have a look at it, you can get  it at
>    http://www.oberon.ch/prod/BlackBox/

I surfed around thier site a bit.

First off, the copyright on the language definition document is held by
OberonMicrosystems, not N. Wirth. Admittedly he is on the board of
directors for OM, but I could find nothing to indicate he had an active
hand in the development of the language.

Their main selling points seem to be the rapid "component" development
environment (which could be built around *any* language), and the
"simplicity" (aka: lack of features) of the language.

The environment admittedly looks nice. But the language doesn't seem to
support tasking, parameterized classes, or low-level systems
programming. If you never had those features in your language before,
fine. But I don't think I could go back to that. Ada might not (yet)
have a slick Windows GUI development environemnt of that caliber, but
there are several contending environments that I can get for free (even
for commercial work). Some even provide portable GUIs.

A cynic might go through that site and come away with the following
series of events:

1993: OberonMicrosystems founded by N. Wirth and others at ETH Z�rich to
explore the growing commercial possiblities in the Oberon language.

1995: OM marketing grows dissatisfied with their competive position vs.
Delphi. After a braistorming session, it was decided that a
Delphi-killer product would have the following characteristics:
  o  It would of course have a complete RAD environment.
  o  The language would be named "Pascal".
  o  It would have extensions that they could tout as "Object-Oriented"
  o  Like Delphi, it would be under complete control of the vendor.
  o  To reduce implementation and maintence costs, it would have as few
features as possible.

1997: OM publishes a suitably modified version of the Oberon-2 report,
dubbed "Component Pascal Language Report (preliminary)". (see section 1,
paragraph 1 of the report). Since the language is under their complete
control, they don't ever bother revising the report past the
"preliminary" stage.


If you are a Delphi customer, this is probably a description of a system
worth looking into. But personally, I wouldn't like the idea of forgoing
all the extra features and capabilities of Ada, and subjecting myself to
a closed language and a closed-source development environment.

--
T.E.D.


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