If someone asked you to name some computer languages, any computer languages, chances are good that Pascal would be among them. It’s a popular, powerful language (most of the Macintosh Toolbox is written in Pascal) and it’s been around for a while. The inventor of Pascal, Dr. Niklaus Wirth, has not been sitting around smirking however, but has come up first with Modula-2 and now with Oberon.
Oberon is more than just a programming language, it’s a full operating system as well. Wirth originally designed it for the Ceres workstation (never heard of it personally), but has been ported to other platforms, such as (you guessed it) the Macintosh. It is genuinely extensible in that it works directly with procedures, abandoning the concept of the program. A set of basic procedures comes with the operating system with added functionality coming from modules written and compiled by users. New procedures can be used as soon as they are compiled since Oberon allows modules to be dynamically added at run-time. The blurb from the Oberon people claims that the system is approximately as fast as interpreted (as in BASIC) because the compiler is quick and no linking is required.
The Macintosh version, appropriately called MacOberon, runs on top of the standard MacOS as a single application under MultiFinder. All the standard Oberon modules are included, so existing Oberon software can be ported to the Mac by re-compiling. I wonder if any re-coding is necessary along with the re-compiling since C is theoretically easily portable between platforms in the same way but C programs often need tweaking to work correctly. One interesting part of the MacOberon port is that it includes "a flexible interface allowing access to the Macintosh operating system and Toolbox routines." We haven’t seen MacOberon yet, but we’re curious to check out how complete a job it does in providing access to the MacOS and Toolbox routines. In theory, MacOberon applications could run outside of the MacOberon environment eventually, but that would require the MacOberon compiler to link the various modules together into a single Macintosh application. I suppose it could keep the modules as resources, which might be a bit easier.
Engst, Adam C. (29 October 1990). MacOberon. tidbits.com/1990/10/29/macoberon/
ETH Zurich
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
12 / 
2014-04-14 / 
0fc130e767dfcc685532b93628b033141239a458 / 
/ 
macoberon_1.22.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
