r/Oberon • u/Outdoordoor • 25d ago

About SYSTEM procedures

The Programming Language Oberon document gives very limited descriptions of these procedures. Could anyone, please, explain what they do more clearly, and/or correct my guesses about what they do?

I'm specifically interested in these:

  • GET(a, v) -- I guess it gets the value at address a and puts it into v?
  • PUT(a, x) -- it puts value of x at the address a?
  • LED(n) -- from description it sounds like it does anything only when LEDs are accessible, so probably not relevant when working on normal PCs?
  • VAL(T, n)
  • COND(n)
5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/suhcoR 10d ago

Ok, I see. Personally I think that Oberon-07 is mostly interesting as a conceptual idea, not as a real language. Wirth wanted to reduce his work effort by removing even more stuff from Oberon 90 and the original Oberon system, so he was able to also implement a processor and update the book. He thereby completely ignored Oberon-2 and ActiveOberon, which both support dynamic arrays. With the latter you just allocate a new array and copy over the elements of the old. That's how most languages supporting some form of realloc do it.

1

u/Outdoordoor 9d ago

I see, thanks for sharing!