The programming language Oberon was named after Oberon, a moon of Uranus.

Oberon Day @ CERN

Efficient Programming for Sciences and Engineering
in the 21st Century

10 March 2004, CERN Main Auditorium
Last update 2007-02-09

Permanent URL for this page: http://www.inr.ac.ru/~blackbox/Oberon.Day/
Original URL for this page: http://cern.ch/oberon.day

We congratulate Professor Niklaus Wirth with his 70th birthday and the 20th anniversary of the Turing Award!

Thanks to all the speakers and attendees for a very successful Oberon Day!

Presentations

Photos   BlackBox intro for physicists (zip, ~2MB)

The Oberon technologies (the family of programming languages and the paradigm of component-oriented programming) are emerging as a powerful complement and superior alternative to the conventional software tools.

The workshop explores the unique blend of simplicity, reliability and efficiency that Oberon brings to the following areas:

• efficient and powerful graphical front-end software;
• robust and memory-efficient embedded data acquisition and control systems;
• algorithm design for complex scientific applications;
• exploratory experimental data processing;
• sophisticated theoretical calculations that break boundaries between numerical and symbolic calculations.

The workshop explores Oberon as a modern alternative to Fortran and C++.

• Oberon: efficient and safe, procedural, modular, object-oriented language with automatic memory management, heir to Pascal and Modula-2.
• Power: efficient and compact compiled code, extremely fast compilation.
• Safety: no header files, no buffer overruns, no memory leaks, no dangling pointers, no segment violation crashes.
• Flexibility: object-oriented features, modularity, dynamic linking.
• Versatility: number crunching, fully dynamic data structures, system programming.
• Productivity: lucid, meticulously designed language; interactive feel of an interpreted system.
• How does Oberon remain so stunningly small and simple?
• The Oberon programming model:
     = procedural programming (true compiled code)
        + modularity (including information hiding and dynamic loading of components)
        + safety (type checking and memory management)
        + object orientation (polymorphism and late binding)
        - all the unnecessary complexity.
• The influence of Oberon: Java and C#; the standard paradigm of modern programming.
• Implementations and variants of Oberon (ETH Oberon, Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon ...).
• Oberon as an upgrade path from Fortran and C++.

Local support: CERN Theory Division  Thanks to the CERN theorists for their support!
Local assistance: Suzy Vascotto  Thanks to Suzy for all her magic!
Coordinator: Fyodor Tkachov