Re: What's new with Oberon/F?

Robert M. Hjellming (rhjellmi@aoc.nrao.edu)
Wed, 13 Nov 1996 13:51:11 -0600

At 12:21 PM 11/13/96 PST, Stan Warford <warford@pepperdine.edu> wrote:

a nice and informative message. However, unless Stan did a hidden CC to
oberonf@math.tau.ac.il, it reached only me. It looked liked one carefully
crafted for both me and the Oberon/F forum; but I did not get it
via oberonf@math.tau.ac.il.

Stan, look at what you CCed to yourself and see if you need to resubmit
it to oberonf@math.tau.ac.il.

As I read your message I began remembering that a personal E-mail
from one of the Oberon microsystems folks in December 1994 said that
a book analagous to Reiser & Wirth was in the works for Oberon/F, and
that they hoped it would be published by the end of 1995. Needless
to say, there is no sign of anything like this for students or teachers
like yourself. Perhaps you should write one and, after testing on a few
classes, offer it for publication.

Personally, for many reasons I would bet that within a few years
Java will be the "first language" at colleges, sweeping the old C and
older Pascal traditions away. If there were more like you teaching with
Oberon, and I understand completely why it is a very good teaching language
for both traditional and OO programming, the tower of Babel of C/C++ might
be producing less monstrous, memory leaking software that has taken
over the commerical world and our pocketbooks.

I actually cannot remember seeing a post before in which someone at
a good university said they were teaching students with Oberon. Maybe
there is better news out there than I thought. It is a small part of
what I was hoping to get in response to my posting.

Cheers, Bob