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The Oberon Programming Language

Oberon is a general-purpose, procedural programming language. Its type-safety and module consistency-checking features facilitate the development of secure and reliable software. Oberon evolved from Modula-2 which was an improved version of Pascal. Programmers with experience in these languages, or Delphi, can adapt to Oberon with minimal effort. Oberon includes low-level features that make it particularly suited to the development of real-time applications on ARM microcontrollers.

In addition to the usual range of programming language facilities Oberon features include:

• Type-extension capabilities
• Assertions
• Automatic array index checking
• IEEE Standard format REALs
• Version consistency and type-checking across modules
• Read-only access to external variables
• Optional read-only access to parameters
• Nested procedures
• Nested comments

Recommended Reading

These documents are also included in all editions of Astrobe:

• The Oberon Language Report by Niklaus Wirth (64 KB PDF file. 16 pages)
  
  The complete official definition of the 2011 Revision of the Oberon language.

• Oberon for Cortex-M3 Microcontrollers by CFB Software (310 KB PDF file. 67 pages)
  
  Astrobe for Cortex-M3 Oberon memory maps, library modules, implementation details etc.

• Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers by CFB Software (292 KB PDF file. 69 pages)
  
  Astrobe for LPC2000 Oberon implementation details.

• Oberon Syntax Diagrams by CFB Software (110 KB zipped Windows CHM Help file)
  
  A cross-referenced, quick, visual summary of the Oberon language syntax.

The following books are general Oberon programming texts which include numerous documented source code examples. Most of the OS-independent procedures should compile without modification using Oberon.

• Algorithms and Data Structures - Oberon Edition by Niklaus Wirth (1.2 MB PDF file. 179 pages)
  
  Many useful general programming examples - sorting, searching, linear lists, recursion, tree  structures, hashing functions etc. All of the source code is presented in Oberon.

• Programming in Oberon by Niklaus Wirth (327 KB PDF file. 65 pages) 
  
  An introduction to programming in general, and a guide to programming in the language Oberon in particular. Note that the 2011 Revision has some differences from the original version of Oberon described here.
  

• Project Oberon - The Design of an Operating System and Compiler by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht (4.2 MB PDF File. 441 pages) 
  
  A complete case study of the implementation of an actual operating system with a graphical user interface for workstations. The Oberon source code for the entire system, including the file system, windows and graphics management, editor, compiler, linker etc. etc. is included.