What's Zonnon's aim at 'highest level' ?

[n***@absamail.co.za]

Hi,

So nice to 'enter the Zonnon-tree' at http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch
using only native-oberon tools, with no trouble.

No crap like 'must enable cookies' & unwarranted *.pdf etc. formats.

It's the minimalist, clear format eg.

Examples in Zonnon for Algorithms & Data Structures book
Zip archive (40 KB size).

ie. showing the download-file-size, which makes for Swiss quality ?

I seek a highest level [overview] of Zonnon's aims to evaluate if I
should spend resources investigating further.

It retains an emphasis on simplicity, clear syntax and
separation of concerns whilst focusing on concurrency and ease of
composition and expression.

Q - How does it acheive better 'ease of composition' than existing
Wirthian languages ?
Q - What is an example of 'ease of expression' and how is this
achieved ?

Unification of abstractions is at the heart
of its design and this is reflected in its conceptual model based on
modules, objects, definitions and implementations.

Q - I'm enthusiastic about any 'unification of concepts' because it
reduces apparent chaos to managable pieces; but where can I read
about this at a high level, without doing all the student exercises ?

Zonnon offers a new
computing model based on active objects with their interaction defined by
syntax controlled dialogs. It also introduces new features including
operator overloading and exception handling, and is specifically designed
to be platform independent.

OK, but it's not clear to me that/how yet another language is justified
for the above aims.
--------------

compiler & tools= http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/compiler/index.html
compiler for Microsoft Visual Studio
development environment
documentation
compiler test suite

I don't use Microsoft if can help to avoid it, but a 'visual' type
of IDE is long overdue: where you 'pick large "structures" instead of
characters' to build source-code - going towards a syntax-editor.
Q - Does 'Microsoft Visual Studio' go in this direction ?

Thanks for Ny input.

== Chris Glur.

[Chris Burrows]

Post by n***@absamail.co.za
I seek a highest level [overview] of Zonnon's aims to evaluate if I
should spend resources investigating further.

My observations, so far, of the motivation behind Zonnon are these:

***warning*** these are totally subjective opinions rather than historical
facts!

1. The Oberon-2 for .NET project hit implementation difficulties that
required modifications to the language rather than just extensions. In the
true Wirth tradition, if you make breaking changes to a language you must
give it a new name.

2. Many reject Oberon before even attempting to properly evaluate it for
reasons such as lack of enumerated types, case-sensitivity etc. Although
proponents and long-time users of Oberon find that its advantages outweigh
these relatively minor points it is very hard to defend them from
antagonists and thus encourage them to give Oberon a fair trial. As a new
language had to be invented, these issues were reconsidered.

3. Pascal Read and Write statements were re-introduced to allow simple,
*portable* IO - for student exercise perhaps?

3. The Implementation and Definition parts of Modula-2 are needed to
interface with 'foreign' (i.e. Non-Oberon) libraries. e.g the .NET
framework.

4. Active Objects were included as it is part of the on-going langauge
research at ETH

These all seem quite logical and noble aims to me. I wish the project every
success!

--
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp

[Chris Burrows]

Post by n***@absamail.co.za
I don't use Microsoft if can help to avoid it, but a 'visual' type
of IDE is long overdue: where you 'pick large "structures" instead of
characters' to build source-code - going towards a syntax-editor.
Q - Does 'Microsoft Visual Studio' go in this direction ?

The 'Visual' in Microsoft Visual Studio is closer to the 'Visual' in Visual
Basic rather than anything related to what I suspect you are referring to.
i.e. it allows you to design GUI forms easily by selecting visual components
(buttons, comboboxes, data-aware grids etc. etc.) from a palette and
dropping them onto the form in the required position. Properties and Event
Handlers which determine the behaviour of the component can also be easily
assigned in the Forms Designer.

Having re-read your question, the VS 'snippets' feature may be of interest.
When writing code in VS you can select common constructs (e.g. 'for') and it
will automatically insert the skeleton code for that construct.

Additionally, Microsoft Visual Studio was designed with a 'plug-in'
architecture so many third-party companies are developing products that give
Visual Studio additional capabilities far in advance of those traditionally
found in an 'IDE'. These include visual modelling tools.

Once a language processor has been adapted to plug-in to VS, then it
potentially can take advantage of the other plug-ins. Oberon-based languages
integrated into VS so far include QUT's Component Pascal for .NET and
Zonnon. However, be aware that the VS versions of both are not yet fully
developed and can only currently be considered as beta-versions at best.

--
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp