Oberon Day 2011 — Continued Simplicity: 25 Years of Oberon

Friday, 27th May 2011 VisDome, Main Building (Hauptgebäude, HG) ETH Zurich, Switzerland

An informal, free-to-attend symposium for researchers, educators, students, and industrial practitioners, who are working with or interested in Oberon-derived systems and software, and lean computing systems in general.

Prof. Jurg Gutknecht, Professor of Computer Science, ETH Zurich

Niklaus Wirth, Prof. emeritus, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

The motivation behind project Oberon 25 years ago was the creation of a computer, a language and an operating system that concentrated on features that were necessary, sufficient, explicable, justifiable, and efficiently implementable. These characteristics are particularly desirable - and rather indispensable - for teaching programming, and for software design in general.

We briefly explain why and how project Oberon came into existence. The steadily growing maze of complexity and bulk of software indicates that these goals are still relevant, actually more so than ever. This has spurned new activities with and about Oberon. We present a brief overview, covering recent work in Zurich on both hardware and software.

Prof. Alan D. Freed, Clifford H. Spicer Chair in Engineering, Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan, USA

In honor of the 25th anniversary of Oberon, I thought a walk down memory lane would be appropriate; in particular, the memories of someone from outside ETH looking in. The first part of my talk will be so geared, revisiting the opportunities and challenges that I have faced when working with Oberon the System, Oberon the Language, and their many developers at ETH Zurich. The second half of my talk will diverge a bit to one of its offspring - Zonnon. Here I will speak on the use of Zonnon both for teaching and for writing production software, the challenges that I have faced, and my opinions on various features of this language. The talk will be given from the perspective of an engineer who has used, and continues to use, Oberon technology as a tool in his day to day activities.

Günter Feldmann, Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

I will describe the usage of the Pascal family of programming languages in computer science courses in the past, why they got abandoned and my motivation to keep them alive on our respective hardware platforms by porting the Oberon system. In the second part I will talk about some of the problems which had to be solved while porting the Oberon and Aos systems.

Michael A. McGaw, Ph.D., McGaw Technology, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio, USA

The liquid oxygen turbopump of a rocket engine has exacting component materials requirements - the structure, seals, and bearings need to withstand dramatic temperature and pressure ranges, so specialized test facilities are used to screen candidate materials. This presentation describes the design of a control system for such a test unit, implemented in Oberon. The host-target architecture provides an operator interface on a conventional Windows computer, and control functions implemented on a separate Oberon-based hardware platform, communicating via a dedicated ethernet connection. The rationale for the choice of Oberon as the target OS and language is described, and a retrospective view of the experiences with this selection (for this and other applications) are highlighted, including a future outlook.

Chris Burrows, CFB Software, Adelaide, Australia

The availability of low-cost powerful 32-bit ARM microcontrollers makes it feasible to use high level languages instead of assembly language to develop real-time embedded software. Shorter development times, improved maintainability and lower costs are the result. However, in embedded systems, performance is also a critical factor. The language Oberon-07 offers the best of both worlds. It has high-level features needed to write comprehensible code but also includes low-level features for use in time-critical tasks.

I will present an overview of the capabilities of NXP Semiconductors' LPC2000 family of ARM microcontrollers and show how Oberon-07 is used to develop maintainable and efficient embedded software for them.

Fyodor Tkachov, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia

А community of educators and programmers has been growing around Oberon in Russia, Belarus, Central Asia etc. since late 90s, with an understanding that Oberon lays ground for a true system of IT education encompassing students from 11-year old kids drawing on their screens with Oberon programs, through third year university students studying compiler construction and software architecture. An important part of the activities is a textbook publishing programme, with four books published already, starting with the flagship «Algorithms and Data Structures. Oberon version» by Niklaus Wirth, and including a bestselling senior high-school programming textbook by Vitaly Potopahkin, a teacher from the city of Khabarovsk in the Far East.

Chair: David Lightfoot, Oxford Brookes University, England