Oberon on Intel MacOS X?

[Duke Normandin]

Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Post by Duke Normandin
Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

What do you mean? You are still working with a Macintosh? Not that's
not possible, you're saying Intel and MacOSX, so that must be at least
a MacMini. The minimum MacMini configuration you can get ships with
2 GB of RAM. Please explain how the choice between Ada and Oberon2
may make any 'size' difference? Or perhaps you're meaning the size of
the language, not the size of the specific implementations you're
considering. If you are only interested in doing some scholarly
exercises, then indeed it may be intersting to use a "smaller"
language, since that would mean less to learn, and possibly a more
formally defined language, where you can write more easily
mathematimatical proofs of the validity of some small algorithms. But
if you have any practical problem to solve, the size of your program
or of the libraries you will use will tramp whatever 'size' the
language is. The only reasonable criterium of language choice, is the
expressiveness of this language, for the class of problems you must
solve, and in this respect, for what I remember of both Ada and
Oberon, they have about the same expressiveness.

So again, what do you mean by 'too big'???

[Duke Normandin]

Post by Pascal J. Bourguignon

Post by Duke Normandin
Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

What do you mean? You are still working with a Macintosh? Not that's
not possible, you're saying Intel and MacOSX, so that must be at least
a MacMini. The minimum MacMini configuration you can get ships with
2 GB of RAM. Please explain how the choice between Ada and Oberon2
may make any 'size' difference? Or perhaps you're meaning the size of
the language, not the size of the specific implementations you're
considering. If you are only interested in doing some scholarly
exercises, then indeed it may be intersting to use a "smaller"
language, since that would mean less to learn, and possibly a more
formally defined language, where you can write more easily
mathematimatical proofs of the validity of some small algorithms. But
if you have any practical problem to solve, the size of your program
or of the libraries you will use will tramp whatever 'size' the
language is. The only reasonable criterium of language choice, is the
expressiveness of this language, for the class of problems you must
solve, and in this respect, for what I remember of both Ada and
Oberon, they have about the same expressiveness.
So again, what do you mean by 'too big'???

You haven't answered the (my) main question - Is there an Oberon2
imlementation for an the Intel MacOS X platform? My reasons for wanting to
test-drive Oberon (as well as Ada) are not important! Thank you!

[Objective Modula-2]

Post by Duke Normandin
Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

If I am not mistaken the only O2 implementation for OSX is the one
from ETHZ

http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/downloads/index

However, this is PPC only but should run on your Intel Mac via
Rosetta.

If you are only going to test-drive, this might be good enough.
Otherwise, it comes with source code, so you could always port it,
probably borrowing the code generator from the Windows or Linux x86
versions.


Also, if it is a question of Ada being too large and Oberon not being
available, you could take a look at GNU Modula-2 or FreePascal, both
of which are available for OSX/Intel. Not quite as minimalist as
Oberon, but a lot smaller than Ada ;-)

http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
http://www.freepascal.org/


Not sure what your ultimate goal is for OSX, but if you are planning
to write GUI applications, you are probably going to need support for
the Cocoa API (the other API called Carbon is on its way out). It then
depends on what side of the Smalltalk divide you are. If you dislike
the native style, you might like the way FPC supports Cocoa, if you do
like the native style, you are going to hate it, you want to stick
with Objective-C and check the progress at

http://objective.modula2.net

This supports Cocoa the same way Objective-C does (which the Delphi
folks hate) but it is based on a dialect of Modula-2 that is more
Oberon-like. In fact the method declaration syntax is straight from
Oberon-2.

[August Karlstrom]

Post by Duke Normandin
Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

You could try OOC:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooc/

Needs to be compiled from the source.


August

[Duke Normandin]

Post by August Karlstrom

Post by Duke Normandin
Wondering if there is an Oberon2 implementation specifically for the Intel
MacOS X (Leopard). I'm trying out Ada at the moment, but it may be too big
for my needs. ;)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooc/
Needs to be compiled from the source.
August

Thanks! I'll give it a try as well!