Mesa is a programming language developed in the late 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language.
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
Oberon is a general-purpose programming language first published in 1987 by Niklaus Wirth and the latest member of the Wirthian family of ALGOL-like languages. Oberon was the result of a concentrated effort to increase the power of Modula-2, the direct successor of Pascal, and simultaneously to reduce its complexity. Its principal new feature is the concept of type extension of record types. It permits constructing new data types on the basis of existing ones and to relate them, deviating from the dogma of strictly static typing of data. Type extension is Wirth's way of inheritance reflecting the viewpoint of the parent site. Oberon was developed as part of the implementation of an operating system, also named Oberon at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The name is from the moon of the planet Uranus, named Oberon.
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honour of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.
In computer programming, a p-code machine is a virtual machine designed to execute p-code. This term is applied both generically to all such machines, and to specific implementations, the most famous being the p-Machine of the Pascal-P system, particularly the UCSD Pascal implementation, among whose developers, the p in p-code was construed to mean pseudo more often than portable, thus pseudo-code meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine.
The Oberon System is a modular, single-user, single-process, multitasking operating system written in the programming language of the same name. It was originally developed in the late 1980s at ETH Zürich. The Oberon System has an unconventional visual text user interface instead of a conventional CLI or GUI. This "TUI" was very innovative in its time and influenced the design of the Acme text editor for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.
Component Pascal is a programming language in the tradition of Niklaus Wirth's Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon and Oberon-2. It bears the name of the language Pascal and preserves its heritage, but is incompatible with Pascal. Instead, it is a minor variant and refinement of Oberon-2 with a more expressive type system and built-in string support. Component Pascal was originally named Oberon/L, and was designed and supported by a small ETH Zürich spin-off company named Oberon microsystems. They developed an integrated development environment (IDE) named BlackBox Component Builder. Since 2014, development and support has been taken over by a small group of volunteers. The first version of the IDE was released in 1994, as Oberon/F. At the time, it presented a novel approach to graphical user interface (GUI) construction based on editable forms, where fields and command buttons are linked to exported variables and executable procedures. This approach bears some similarity to the code-behind way used in Microsoft's .NET 3.0 to access code in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which was released in 2008.
The DISER Lilith is a custom built workstation computer based on the AMD 2901 bit-slice processor, created by a group led by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. The project started in 1977 and by 1984 several hundred workstations were in use. It had a high resolution full page display, a mouse, a laser printer interface, and a network interface. Its software was written completely in Modula-2 and included a relational database program called Lidas.
Oberon-2 is an extension of the original Oberon programming language that adds limited reflection and object-oriented programming facilities, open arrays as pointer base types, read-only field export and reintroduces the FOR loop from Modula-2.
PL/0 is a programming language, intended as an educational programming language, that is similar to but much simpler than Pascal, a general-purpose programming language. It serves as an example of how to construct a compiler. It was originally introduced in the book, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, by Niklaus Wirth in 1976. It features quite limited language constructs: there are no real numbers, very few basic arithmetic operations and no control-flow constructs other than "if" and "while" blocks. While these limitations make writing real applications in this language impractical, it helps the compiler remain compact and simple.
Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality.
Kronos is a 32–bit workstation of a proprietary architecture developed in the mid-1980s in Akademgorodok, a research center of the Russian Academy of Science near Novosibirsk.
Bluebottle is a modular, object-oriented operating system. Originally developed at ETH Zurich, it has some unconventional features, including automatic, garbage-collected memory management and a zooming user interface.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is a 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth covering some of the fundamental topics of computer programming, particularly that algorithms and data structures are inherently related. For example, if one has a sorted list one will use a search algorithm optimal for sorted lists.
Active Oberon is a general purpose programming language developed during 1996-1998 by the group around Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. It is an extension of the programming language Oberon. The extensions aim at implementing active objects as expressions for parallelism. Compared to its predecessors, Oberon and Oberon-2, Active Oberon adds objects, system-guarded assertions, preemptive priority scheduling and a changed syntax for methods. Objects may be active, which means that they may be threads or processes. The operating system A2, renamed Bluebottle OS, especially the kernel, synchronizes and coordinates different active objects.
The Ceres Workstation was a computer built by Niklaus Wirth's group around 1985. Ceres was a workstation based on the NS320xx a CPU by National Semiconductor. Ceres was a follow-up project to the Lilith, a machine based on AMD bit-slice technology and the programming language Modula-2. The operating system of Ceres, called "The Oberon System" was completely written in the programming language Oberon. It is an early example of an object oriented operating system utilizing garbage collection on the system level and a document centered approach for the user interface, as envisaged later with OpenDoc.
Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system (OS) and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It was later used for programming outside the context of the Lilith.
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science.
Jürg Gutknecht is a Swiss computer scientist. He developed, with Niklaus Wirth, the programming language Oberon and the corresponding operating system Oberon.
Zonnon is a general purpose programming language in the line or family of the preceding languages Pascal, Modula, and Oberon. Jürg Gutknecht is the author.
