Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:S9NR9.112846$Y86.81884@news2.central.cox.net...
> Robert C. Leif wrote:
> > To be fair, Ada should be compared to Wirth's latest creation, Oberon.
> > Oberon is available as a .NET compiler. While the Ada community has
talked
> > incessantly about writing an operating system, Wirth and Gutknecht did.
> > Oberon and its operating system are described in Project Oberon,
> > Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
> > Some of the Oberon software could be translated into Ada.
>
>
> I have the book, and have even used the OS. I don't think its something
> that someone used to a modern OS is going to enjoy. But its nice to see
> people experimenting with the basic UI assumptions we are all accustomed
> to (well..it *was* nice to see back in '95 anyway).

Actually, Oberon came out in '90 or '91.  I bought Reiser's book on the
system in 1991 while I was on a temporary field gig in Colorado Springs.

> Oberon itself is interesting, but I wouldn't want to write something
> large in it (assuming Ada was available). Wirth's primary obsession when
> writing it was in keeping the language simple. That's a worthy goal, but
> the primary one should be keeping the user's programs simple (and easy
> to understand and easy to debug, etc.). I'd say the two are closely
> related, but are not the same thing.

Actually, Oberon started as an operating system project.  Wirth and
Gutknecht took a sabbatical, and got royally ticked off at the quality (lack
thereof) of workstation Unix.  Shortly after they got home, Wirth got tapped
to teach the systems programming class, an area in which he had very little
knowledge.  So, they needed a project to get experience, and Wirth has long
followed the Computer Science tradition of ending the sentence "There has to
be a better way..." with "... and I will build it myself."

What makes Oberon interesting is that it did in a few hundred kilobytes what
everyone else needed multiple megabytes to do.

It also made one very definite point, and the operating system manual
brought this out very clearly: text is text is text.  If you can see text on
the screen, you can grab it, copy it, paste it, hand it of to the "shell" as
a command, use it as an argument, edit it in place, or WHATEVER.  Speaking
as a user, of Oberon and a bunch of other things, this is a MAJOR
improvement over just about everything else in the world, both before and
since.