erv@everest.TANDEM.COM (E. Videki) (05/24/91)
Archive-name: languages/oberon/oberon-m/1991-05-23 Archive: wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors/msdos/pgmutl/obronm* [128.252.135.4] Original-posting-by: erv@everest.TANDEM.COM (E. Videki) Original-subject: Re: Oberon for MS-DOS Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) In article <BAFE9C2140000681@brfapesp.bitnet>, UNBCIC@BRFAPESP.BITNET writes: |> I couldn't find the MS-DOS Oberon in the ftp site at Zurich. Could anybody |> help me? |> |> (8-DCS) |> Daniel C. Sobral |> UNBCIC@BRFAPESP.BITNET |> |> P.S.: I know it isn't good, but is for learning purposes. I just don't understand the "it isn't good" statement. There is only ONE known bug in the compiler, and it and its libraries have been in use by many individuals since 1989! True it doesn't support dynamic loading and garbage collection, but that is because most DOS users have told me they don't want such things. They want a well behaved application program which won't make it impossible to keep running Lotus or whatever. The code generation is excellent, everything runs fast, and I've seen several impressive applications written on it, one of which is going commercial by the fall. The explanitory note I received from ETH was that they have a policy that only software they write is going to be housed on their servers. All the other places have been happy to keep it. -- E. Videki (author of Oberon-M) PS: The single known bug is the one reported elsewhere in this newsgroup. Specifically, when you have an open-array of pointers, and index that array, the automatic dereferencing gets a little too ambitious and dereferences the indexed array element. Thus, the following statement will get a type incompatibility error: ptrvar := arrayofptrs[someindex] it is acting like ptrvar:=arrayofptrs[someindex]^ . This only applies to open-arrays. If you have a fixed array you can work around this. If it is critical, you can remember that range checking won't stop you from going to a very large array (larger than the type definition). I've already done the fix, and on the next distribution it will appear at all the sites. --EV -- comp.archives file verification wuarchive.wustl.edu -rw-r--r-- 1 20002 archive 165120 Apr 29 19:00 /mirrors/msdos/pgmutl/obronm11.zip found oberon-m ok wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors/msdos/pgmutl/obronm*