alt Hacker NewsExactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever.
What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "you should put a link about what this thing is" are needless.
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Yes, you are likely confusing Oberon with Pascal. That is the Wirth language people usually have heard about. They may also have heard about Modula 2, but assuming that is stretching it. I was already interested in computers at the time, but I still only remember Oberon as that even bigger failure than Modula.
The problem with this is that there are so many branches of tech from 40 years ago that any one person is unlikely to be familiar with all of them.
I'm plenty familiar with the whole Modula 3 -> NextSTEP branch of this little tree, but the Oberon branch isn't something I've run into before.
> I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth.
Yes, I think that's a mistake. Lisp and Forth saw widespread commercial use, were hugely influential, and directly begat many other languages. While I'd expect most folks on here to be familiar with Pascal - you could say those same things about it - and maybe even know who Wirth is, Oberon basically saw no commercial use whatsoever and even in academia was basically only used at the school it came from. There's no real comparison.