FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on.

Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.

That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)

Tangentially related, but I hope will be appreciated by the nostalgic people here:

Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article:

https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt

It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.

For me the power of Object Pascal and Delphi was the ability to create reusable components that could be easily installed into the IDE. These components had powerful property sheets which could be used to set the values for their various properties etc.

Lazarus does fill that gap but somehow doesn't quite have the same feeling as the original Delphi.

The Free Oberon IDE looks like Turbo Pascal development enviroment from the late 80s and the early 90s. I wonder if it would have the concept of reusable components.

Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting.

Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.

Can't wait to try this on Mac (English manual install intstructions at https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf9...). I feel like Oberon is very much worth a look for people interested in small, powerful languages.

I think this type of IDE was one of my favourites over the years.

There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.

Wonder why they still haven't got their spark-like proof system from Ada. Would be more worth than playing with the graphics stuff, they added.

"freeoberon-lang.org"

The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in.

Extremely poor taste.