Alan, thanks for the detailed history!
> 1966 was the year I entered grad school (having programmed for 4-5 years, > but essentially knowing nothing about computer science). Shortly after > encounters with and lightning bolts from the sky induced by Sketchpad and > Simula, I found the Euler papers and thought you could make something with > "objects" that would be nicer if you used Euler for a basis rather than how > Simula was built on Algol. That turned out to be the case and I built this > into > the table-top plus display plus pointing device personal computer Ed Cheadle > and I made over the next few years. Is this available anywhere beyond the small fragments at http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html and http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html ? Though you often mention the machine itself, I have never seen you put these texts in the list of what people should read like you do with Ivan's thesis. > The last time I looked at Oberon (at Apple more than 15 years ago) it did > not impress, and did not resemble anything I would call an object-oriented > language -- or an advance on anything that was already done in the 70s. > But that's just my opinion. And perhaps it has improved since then. It was an attempt to step back from the complexity of Modula-2, which is a good thing. It has the FONC goal of being small enough to be completely read and understood by one person (he does mention that this is in the form of a 600 page book in the talk). In the early 1990s I was trying to build a really low cost computer around the Self language and a professor who always had interesting insights suggested that something done with Oberon would require fewer hardware resources. I studied the language and saw that they had recently made it object oriented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2_%28programming_language%29 But it turned out that this was a dead end and the then current system was built with the original, non object oriented version of the language (as it is to this day - the OO programming Wirth mentioned in the talk is the kind of thing you can do in plain C). I liked the size of the system, but the ALL CAPS code hurt my eyes and the user interface was awkward (both demonstrators in the movie had problems using it, though Wirth had the excuse that he hadn't used it in a long time). -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
