Oberon-2 - Episode 1
I am still trying to push myself into actually learning to put the programming language Oberon-2 into practice in an actual project. And I’m still dancing around the periphery of my programming course.
Much of the early portion of the book “Oberon-2 Programming With Windows” concerns itself with actually setting up and getting acquainted with the programming environment. An interesting aspect of this environment is that it is not exactly like the environment Niklaus Wirth created when he created the Oberon language to enable the creation of the Oberon operating system back in the 1980s. The original Oberon system did not require that modules be linked explicitly to a program. They are somewhat independent entities. How this can be so is beyond the scope of this post; but in this implementation of Oberon for Windows named Pow!, one module has to be designated as the main module, which then can be explicitly linked to other modules.
The idea of modules being integrated into a whole is hardly unique to Oberon, of course. The idea of “top-down” design goes back at least to the 1970s, where it was felt that the best way to handle complicated tasks is by breaking them down into less complicated tasks, which could also be further broken down into simpler tasks of simple resolution.
For a general purpose language, this is truly an elegant concept.
Perhaps this is where we see the main difference between elegant block structured languages and the old business languages like Cobol and RPG. I will speak of RPG, since that is what I am most familiar with. RPG IV is what might be considered a “large” language. Everything you might ever want to do in business programming is part of RPG; and when you read discussions of how RPG might be improved, you will read suggestions of features that should be ADDED to the language. You will never hear talk of modules or “libraries” or even “service programs” being able to be referenced by the language. New features must be PART of the language; and if they are implemented, they simply make the language bigger and, in most cases, more complicated.
And so we see this world-view even in the structure of RPG programs. Usually, an RPG program does not consist of a few program or procedure calls in a relatively short mainline. It usually consists of a substantial mainline with occasional calls to subroutines or procedures. There is relatively little need or use of the top-down paradigm, or conceptual model. It is possible to do it in RPG, but the very layout of the language does not encourage it. For example, I recall being amused years ago by an RPG program that had only one one line in its detail calculations; it did all its work in a subroutine named DETAIL, which was called by the calculation EXSR DETAIL. The very phrase “service program”, used today to refer to a collection of often-used routines into one module, suggests a servant pressed into duty of a superior routine, rather than a coequal partner in the main processing. The name “subroutine” has the same connotation, even if the subroutines do the bulk of the processing. They are subordinate, called by the main “detail” routine.
As RPG is currently constituted, I would consider this the most effective way of using the language. For example, there is the concept that all file handling operations should be consigned to a service program, which would then handle accessing, inserting, deleting, and updating records in a given file. I know I’ve seen the concept recommended, though I can’t give specific examples offhand. But when file handling is so easy in RPG, why bother with a service program when you can do it directly? ACCT# CHAIN MASTER.
So I’m up against a wall of habit and preconceived ideas as I continue to try to expand my horizons, and perhaps my effectiveness, by learning a language built on new concepts and that can be completely described (in the official report on the language) in 16 pages of normally spaced text. Just for comparison, the report for C++ is 740 pages in length. (I am already acquainted with BASIC.) If I can’t learn Oberon, there’s not much point in trying others.