Discussion:
Aim of Oberon for .NET?
(too old to reply)
Frank Hrebabetzky
2004-06-23 03:07:35 UTC
Permalink
From what I read at the ETH site, Oberon for .NET is a command line
compiler which generates Windows executables. Now what is the aim?
Making available a compiler for programming exercises without having
to bother with the Oberon OS? Or a software development tool?

In the latter case, what is the interface to Windows:
- Access to DLLs?
- Creation of DLLs?
- Any plans about any GUI?

Excuse my ingorance, but what is that .NET thing anyway? Of course I
had a look at the net, but from the inumerous Google hits, I was just
able to infer two things:
1. It is from MS
2. It is a marvel.
--
Frank Hrebabetzky +55 / 48 / 235 1106
Florianopolis, Brazil
jmdrake
2004-06-23 21:25:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Frank Hrebabetzky
From what I read at the ETH site, Oberon for .NET is a command line
compiler which generates Windows executables. Now what is the aim?
Making available a compiler for programming exercises without having
to bother with the Oberon OS? Or a software development tool?
The aim was to write an Oberon compiler that could target the
Microsoft .NET common language specification (ILASM). Standalone
Oberon compilers already existed so that was not the primary aim.
Oberon .NET was one of the first "non Microsoft" .NET languages.
Post by Frank Hrebabetzky
- Access to DLLs?
- Creation of DLLs?
- Any plans about any GUI?
All .NET languages can use each other's binary code. It's like
compilers that target JVM. I recall someone in this newsgroup
did a test calling an Oberon .NET module from a Component Pascal
.NET module (or perhaps it was the other way around).

http://www.citi.qut.edu.au/research/plas/projects/cp_files/cpnet.html
Post by Frank Hrebabetzky
Excuse my ingorance, but what is that .NET thing anyway? Of course I
had a look at the net, but from the inumerous Google hits, I was just
1. It is from MS
2. It is a marvel.
It's hard to unravel because Microsoft has thrown the term ".NET" at
several different things. In this case it's their common language
runtime.

Regards,

John M. Drake
Marc Martin
2004-06-23 21:34:21 UTC
Permalink
Post by Frank Hrebabetzky
From what I read at the ETH site, Oberon for .NET is a command line
compiler which generates Windows executables. Now what is the aim?
Making available a compiler for programming exercises without having
to bother with the Oberon OS? Or a software development tool?
.NET has a complete application framework, so you can build a Windows
applications with the standard Windows GUI behavior. In theory
this can be done with any .NET compiler, but the framework makes
assumptions about language capabilities that may not exist in your
language of choice (unless they've extended that language for .NET).
You should be able to access the .NET framework DLL's, but perhaps
not standard Win32 DLL's (unless they've implemented this). I think
the goal of .NET might be to replace the entire Win32 API with
something that's easier to use.

As for a developer's GUI, a command line compiler can be "good enough" for
programmers, because you can take some text editors (e.g. TextPad)
and customize them so they become a simple integrated development
environment.

The thing that puts me off about .NET applications is that on my
admittedly old machine (1 Ghz), it takes about 10 seconds for the
framework to launch the first time, because the framework needs
to load and the application code needs to be compiled "on the fly".
So even the simplest "Hello World" program takes 10 seconds
to launch. If you re-launch it soon after, it only take 2 seconds
(because the framework is already loaded), but if you wait too
long, then it'll take 10 seconds again...

Marc
Frank Hrebabetzky
2004-06-26 03:02:23 UTC
Permalink
Thanks.

Loading...